About Joshua Fernandes

About Joshua Fernandes

Joshua Fernandes

I'm Joshua Fernandes, a solutions engineer and AI governance researcher from Cuncolim, Goa, India. I build large Drupal websites for a living, I research how AI systems make decisions that affect people, and I teach and mentor students and developers in Goa.

What I work on

  • AI agents: designing and wiring up AI agents in Drupal with the Drupal AI Agents framework, tool and MCP integrations, and the context agents work from.
  • Large language models: working with models from many providers, and evaluating them, including LLM-as-a-judge scoring in ai_empathy.
  • Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): grounding AI answers in an organisation's own documents and content, as Drupal AI Context does.
  • Offline AI systems: running models locally on my own hardware, privacy-first, with nothing sent to the cloud.
  • AWS infrastructure: hosting and integrating applications on Amazon Web Services, such as image recognition with AWS Rekognition in Drupal, which I presented at DrupalCamp Atlanta 2021.
  • Forward-deployed engineering: working embedded in client teams to take a solution from requirements to production.
  • Enterprise Drupal: architecture, custom modules, large migrations and headless builds, for government and enterprise.

Work

I'm a Senior Solutions Engineer at Axelerant, a Diamond-certified Drupal partner, where I've worked since 2021. Through Axelerant I work as an embedded engineer with Salsa Digital in Melbourne, on Australian government platforms: GovCMS and the Victorian Government's Single Digital Presence. This is forward-deployed work: I'm part of their team day to day. It includes migrating large government websites into Drupal, contributing to Salsa's Merlin migration tool, and building open-source Drupal projects:

Before Axelerant I was a senior software engineer at SJ Innovation and a software engineer at Online Productivity Solutions, both in Verna, Goa. I've worked in web development for more than ten years, across higher education, government, e-commerce, banking and news.

Looking for help with a Drupal or Drupal AI project? See Drupal AI consulting and training, or get in touch.

Research

I'm a doctoral researcher in the PhD in Management for Working Professionals at IIM Sambalpur, working on human-centred AI governance: how to make sure AI systems that help make decisions about people are empathetic, trustworthy and accountable. I've published peer-reviewed papers on empathy in AI decision-making and on auditing AI-assisted hiring, and I build the open-source ai_empathy module that puts the research into practice.

Read the research overview, see my publications, or try the free empathy assessment.

Education

  • PhD in Management (Working Professionals), Indian Institute of Management Sambalpur, from 2026: human-centred AI governance.
  • Postgraduate Diploma in Business Analytics, BITS Pilani, 2022–2023.
  • Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology, Padre Conceição College of Engineering (PCCE), Verna, Goa University, 2010–2014.

Drupal and open source

I've contributed to Drupal since 2015. I maintain more than 16 community projects, have written core patches and received security credits, and contribute to the Drupal AI Initiative. I've spoken at DrupalCamp Atlanta, DrupalCamp NYC and Drupal GovCon (2021). My sessions range from image recognition with AWS Rekognition to Gulp and Docker-based local development; see my talks and workshops. I volunteered at DrupalCon Global 2020, DrupalCon Europe 2021 and Drupal GovCon 2021, and I mentor new contributors through the DrupalCon scholarship programme and Discover Drupal, which trains people from historically under-represented communities for Drupal careers. I wrote about that mentoring in Drupal's Discover Drupal program for Salsa Digital. Find my work on Drupal.org and GitHub.

Videos

See all my videos, or subscribe on YouTube.

Teaching and community in Goa

In 2013 I started Smart Educational Technologies in Cuncolim to teach programming and web development. Since then I've:

  • served on the Department Advisory Board of the Computer Engineering department at PCCE, my old college, since 2023;
  • judged Odyssey 2026 at PCCE, and given the alumni tech talk at Aarush 2022, PCCE's industry–institute symposium;
  • run Drupal and content management workshops for BCA students at Sridora Caculo College, Mapusa (2016) and Goa Multi-Faculty College, Dharbandora (2018).

I now run AI workshops for teachers and colleges as well. See training.

Outside work

I garden in my downtime, and I like taking apart remote-controlled gadgets to see how they work. My family also runs Homemade Delights by Fernandes, making traditional Goan ready-to-eat fish and pickles in Cuncolim.

I speak English, Hindi and Konkani.

Elsewhere