What Saarthi Alma is
Saarthi Alma is an alumni engagement platform that connects graduates with their institutions for mentorship, donations and events. It was designed, built and deployed in under 36 hours at Smart India Hackathon 2024 and won at the national level — the largest hackathon run by the Government of India.
My role: Backend engineer — data model, authentication, matching service, payments.
The problem it solves
Institutions lose contact with alumni almost immediately after graduation. The relationship is worth a great deal to both sides — mentorship, hiring, funding — but the tooling is usually a spreadsheet and an annual email. The hackathon problem statement asked for a platform that would make that relationship ongoing rather than ceremonial.
How it works
Under a 36-hour clock the design decisions are really scoping decisions. We built three things properly rather than eight things partially: an authentication and role system with JWT and role-based access so students, alumni and administrators genuinely see different products; an AI-assisted matching layer that scores alumni profiles against student interests to suggest mentors instead of presenting a searchable directory; and a Razorpay payment integration so donations and paid events worked on the demo, not in the slide deck. I owned the backend — data model, auth, matching service and payment integration.
The outcome
National winner at Smart India Hackathon 2024. The more durable lesson was about scope discipline under a hard deadline: a demo that does three things end-to-end beats one that does eight things up to the point where they would need a backend.
Technology used
- Node.js
- MongoDB
- React.js
- AI/ML
- Razorpay
Engineering highlights
- Won Smart India Hackathon 2024 - national-level recognition
- AI-based profile matching for alumni-student mentorship connections
- Integrated Razorpay for donations and event payments
- JWT auth, role-based access and secure session management
- Built and deployed end-to-end in under 36 hours