Sampanna Dahal

I'm a software engineer in Kathmandu. Since March 2023 I've been at echowin, a voice-AI startup out of Austin, where I joined as the founding engineer, worked on the real-time voice-to-voice system that its phone agents run on, and now own the self-serve product end to end. Since 2026 I've also been a founding engineer at TurnPanel, built inside echowin Inc.: one shared workspace for a team and the coding agents it already uses, with every project in its own sandbox.

Before that I did computer vision research at Rara Labs and studied computer engineering at Pulchowk Campus. Most of what I've built has been speech, audio, or vision systems that have to work in the real world.

Work

2026 – now

TurnPanel

Founding Engineer. Built inside echowin Inc., run alongside it.

A shared workspace where a team and its coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and others) work together, with every project in its own sandbox.
Work across the desktop app, the agent harness integrations, and turnpanel.com: accounts, sign-up hardening, telemetry and deploys.

2023 – now

echowin

Founding Engineer → Lead Software Engineer → Product Lead. Remote, for Austin, TX.

Worked on the core voice-to-voice system for conversational phone agents with the rest of the early team: low-latency audio streaming over WebSockets, streaming ASR and TTS, and the telephony layer on Telnyx and Twilio.
Designed and built the multi-tenant agency platform that lets partners white-label and resell echowin with per-tenant isolation.
Lead the web app (React, Remix, deployed on Cloudflare Workers): onboarding, lead-qualification pipelines, activation flows.
Primary billing engineer. Designed and maintain the Stripe integration; delivered 10DLC registration and compliance.
Architected enterprise and government deployments, including outbound calling agents and chatbots for the Embassy of Nepal in the USA, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Nepal's Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security, and an enterprise sales and vendor-operations agent for a Fortune 50 company.
Led the incorporation of echowin's Nepal entity and built the team there.

2022 – 2023

Rara Labs

Computer Vision Research Engineer. Kathmandu.

AI lead on a $100,000 pre-pilot with the British Council and Nepal's Ministry of Water Supply, applying computer vision to national water-supply infrastructure.
Built real-time detection of taps, pillars and reservoirs (YOLO, VGG16, custom architectures), and scraped and curated the training data from public ministry sources.

Projects

2026

Tap KTM

A community-kept map of the Kathmandu Valley venues that pour draught beer, and which breweries each one serves. Many restaurants sign exclusive pouring deals, so finding a different pint takes local knowledge; this puts it on a map anyone can correct. Next.js, PostgreSQL, OpenStreetMap.

2023

Aawaj

An augmentative and alternative communication app for people who can't speak, built on a Nepali text-to-speech engine I trained from scratch on OpenSLR data (Tacotron 2, transfer learning from an English model). Has a hands-free eye-tracking mode for ALS and paralysis patients and a phrase-based mode for the hearing impaired. Flutter, Flask. My final-year project.

2022

ShishuCare

Neonatal-care telemedicine for low-resource settings. Won the BPKIHS / gdhub Healthcare Hackathon 2022.

Education

2018 – 2023

Institute of Engineering, Pulchowk Campus, Tribhuvan University

B.E. in Computer Engineering. 83.18% aggregate.

Awards and talks

2023

Winner, Logpoint Capture The Flag (basic category).

2023

Organizer, Naamche Hack-A-Week, the LOCUS pre-event at Pulchowk.

2022

Speaker, Digital Health Conference.

2022

Winner, BPKIHS / gdhub Healthcare Hackathon, for ShishuCare.

Languages

Nepali (native), English and Hindi (fluent). Code in Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, C++, Dart.