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Bio, Work & Ideas

Anush DSouza

Conference affiliation: Heroku · 2025

Anush DSouza is a senior product manager at Heroku focused on the infrastructure and developer tools behind production AI applications. His work on Heroku Managed Inference and Agents, the Heroku MCP Server, and isolated code execution helps developers connect language models to software and organizational data without surrendering control over deployment, permissions, or compute.

Earlier in his career, DSouza worked across software engineering and product management at Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, and Sprinklr. He holds a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Southern California.

In 2025, DSouza coauthored the introduction of the official Heroku MCP Server, which lets AI clients perform platform operations through Heroku’s existing command-line tooling. The subsequent Heroku Remote MCP Server extended those capabilities beyond a developer’s computer through OAuth-authenticated agent connections.

At AI Engineer World’s Fair 2025, DSouza joined Julián Duque for a workshop on managed inference and agents. DSouza emphasized operational challenges that follow an initial prototype: model selection, scaling, trusted tool execution, and integrating inference, compute, databases, and Model Context Protocol extensions into one developer workflow.

  • Secure agent interoperability. DSouza’s MCP work makes infrastructure accessible to tools including Claude, Cursor, and Agentforce while retaining authentication and explicit access boundaries.
  • Isolated code execution for agents. His agent sandbox architecture uses temporary one-off dyno sandboxes to run generated code. Processing larger datasets outside the model’s context window allows agents to return compact results without repeatedly passing bulky intermediate data through inference.
  • Production-quality retrieval. His writing on AI search architecture and data-aware applications with LlamaIndex addresses a practical weakness of vector similarity alone: semantically related documents do not necessarily answer the user’s question. He emphasizes retrieval design and access to relevant private data.

More recently, DSouza has helped expand Heroku’s managed model catalog and deployment options, continuing to simplify how developers configure and operate AI applications.

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1 conference talk

Key ideas

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Build up from a hosted Jupyter notebook to streaming inference, executable tools, read-only database analysis and MCP servers that other clients can discover and call.

  • Start with a notebook that needs only a browser
    0:18 ↗
  • Make the agent loop an application resource
    3:54 ↗
  • Deploy Jupyter with notebook persistence
    8:02 ↗
  • Attach inference and load the execution context
    13:03 ↗
  • Inspect a completion, then consume its deltas
    20:18 ↗
  • Move tool execution into the managed loop
    24:46 ↗
  • Ask the server for its current time
    28:27 ↗
  • Keep the computation, change the runtime
    30:56 ↗
  • Retrieve an implementation before running it
    33:19 ↗
  • Attach a read-only database before querying it
    35:46 ↗
  • Discover the schema, then investigate energy savings
    39:16 ↗
  • Add Brave Search through MCP
    42:58 ↗
  • Give an existing MCP a Heroku entry point
    46:07 ↗
  • Call the same tools from an MCP client
    47:58 ↗
  • Use the OpenAI SDK, then continue experimenting
    50:50 ↗

References