Sourabh Karandikar - Profile

Making things happen

I enjoy pursuing underlying truths in systems. Math and meditation being the tools of choice!

About Me

Bridging the gap between cutting-edge AI research and practical business solutions.

Senior Machine Learning Engineer with 6 years of experience delivering measurable business impact through AI innovation. I specialize in deep learning for computer vision & NLP, agentic RAG systems, RLHF, vector database pipelines, and scalable MLOps. My proven track record includes delivering revenue & profit lift while leading cross-functional teams and managing complete ML/AI pipelines from ideation to production.

I have architected enterprise-grade AI solutions that transform how businesses operate. My expertise spans the full spectrum of modern AI technologies—from traditional machine learning to cutting-edge large language models—with a focus on product-driven research that drives real business outcomes. I have maintained ISO 42001, ISO 27001 & SOC2 compliant ML lifecycles, ensuring both innovation and regulatory excellence.

My recent work centers on next-generation AI applications: agentic RAG pipelines, reinforcement learning from human feedback, and vector database optimization for personalized experiences. I'm passionate about bridging the gap between cutting-edge research and practical business solutions, leading AI initiatives that not only push technological boundaries but deliver tangible value to stakeholders and end users.

Education

Carnegie Mellon University

Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering

Jan 2018 - May 2019

University of Mumbai

Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics

Aug 2013 - May 2017

Key Expertise

Systems Thinking & Requirements Engineering

Breaking complex business challenges into actionable ML solutions, translating ambiguous business needs into precise technical specifications and success metrics while identifying root causes vs. symptoms

Rapid Prototyping & Experimental Validation

Quick proof-of-concept development with iterative improvement cycles, A/B testing frameworks, statistical significance testing, and bias detection for fail-fast experimentation

Research Translation & Model Optimization

Evaluating and adapting cutting-edge research into production systems, selecting optimal model families and architectures, implementing fine-tuning strategies (RLHF, LoRA, QLoRA) to achieve specific business objectives

Data Strategy & Governance

Building data pipelines from scratch, ensuring data quality and lineage, privacy-preserving techniques

Communication & Organizational Impact

Upskilling teams through mentorship and documentation standards, creating reusable frameworks and best practices while translating technical complexity into business value propositions to secure executive support

Experience

My professional journey in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computer science.

Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Nov 2023 - Present

Automated core business workflows with agentic RAG pipelines, reducing manual processing time by 15%.

Architected client-specific vector-database stacks that powered real-time personalization across products, boosting CTR by 10%.

Engineered a deep-clustering segmentation model that improved audience-profiling relevance.

Built a next-best-action recommender (reinforcement-guided) that raised credit-line utilization by 7% in early-access.

Designed an automated evaluation pipeline (LangSmith, Weights & Biases) that cut model-benchmark cycle time by 40%.

Prototyped generative-AI use cases and briefed the C-suite, authored a company-wide AI roadmap.

Maintained ISO-42001-aligned ML-lifecycle documentation, resulting in zero audit findings.

Facilitated cross-functional alignment—frontend, backend, product, and domain SMEs—securing consensus on AI feature scope and acceptance criteria, which cut scope churn and kept key releases on schedule.

LLMsVector DatabasesQdrantPineconeGenerative AIPythonML LifecycleAgents

Software Engineer – Machine Learning II

Jun 2020 - Nov 2023

Spearheaded AI/ML use-case discovery and kicked off a data-infrastructure overhaul (AWS Glue, Delta Lake, Airflow)

Built an automated vendor-selection recommender that trimmed 10 min / relocation and saved ~$500 K per year.

Engineered a forecasting model that raised business-projection accuracy by 8 % driving downstream gains in staffing efficiency and customer satisfaction score.

Directed development of a client-expense prediction model, beating the legacy baseline by 14 %.

Launched a client-facing Gen-AI chatbot. Also, an internal HR and RFP assistant reducing processing time by 20%.

Led all AI initiatives, coordinating a six-person team (2 DS, 2 DE, 1 UI dev, 1 scrum master).

LLMsVector DatabasesLangChainChatbotsDeep LearningPredictive ModelingAI/MLData InfrastructureRecommendation SystemsPythonTeam ManagementCost Optimization

Research Associate II

Aug 2019 - Jun 2020

Improved fine grain classification accuracy across 13k SKUs from 76% to 90.5%

Revamped data augmentation & annotation of bot captured images

Led a team to develop fixed camera system as an alternative to robot mounted cameras

Pruned facial landmarking models for embedded applications

Computer VisionDeep LearningImage ClassificationData AugmentationModel PruningEmbedded SystemsPythonTeam LeadershipImage Processing

Skills

Comprehensive overview of my skills across modern AI, machine learning, and software development.

Programming

PythonCC++RSQLCUDAMATLAB

Data & Big Data

PandasNumPyPineconeQdrantMilvusWeaviatePostgreSQLMySQLMongoDBSnowflakeRedshiftGoogle BigQuery

Deep Learning Frameworks

PyTorchTensorFlowKerasScikitJAXHugging Face TransformersBitsAndBytesPEFT/LoRA/QLoRAONNXTensorRT

Generative AI & LLM Ops

Model Context Protocol (MCP)DSPyLangChainLangGraphLangSmithLlama IndexWeaviatePineconeQdrantFAISSChromaGPTLlamaFunction-CallingVector search

MLOps / DevOps

MLflowKubeflowAirflowDockerKubernetesTerraformCI/CDSagemaker PipelinesVertex AI PipelinesAzure (Databricks, OpenAI, Azure Machine Learning)AWS (SageMaker, S3, EC2)Google Cloud (Vertex AI)

NLP & CV

OpenCVSpaCyNLTKDetectron2MMDetectionYOLOv8SentenceTransformersFastTextCTranslate2

AI/ML Techniques

Machine Learning AlgorithmsDeep Learning (CNN, Transformers)Deep Reinforcement LearningComputer Vision & Visual RecognitionStatistical InferenceAdvanced ProbabilityExperiment DesignFine-tuning LLMsLLM ArchitectureLLMOpsPrompt EngineeringRetrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)

Electronics Engineering

Analog & Digital Circuit DesignMicrocontrollers & Embedded SystemsPCB Design & LayoutDigital Signal Processing (DSP) & Filter DesignFPGA Programming (Verilog, VHDL)Control Systems & Feedback TheoryPower Electronics & Motor DrivesCommunication Systems (RF, Wireless, Modulation)

Soft Skills

Technical Leadership (teams of 2-5)Cross-Functional CollaborationStakeholder ManagementHiring & Mentorship

Projects

A showcase of my work in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science.

Project Image

End-to-End Differentiable Co-reference Resolution System

A neural co-reference resolution system integrated into conversational agents to improve dialogue understanding and context tracking.

NLPDeep LearningPyTorchBERTConversational AIResearch
Project Image

GAN-Based Translation Between Medical Image Modalities

Advanced GAN architecture for translating T1-weighted MRI to T2-weighted MRI using Self-Attention GAN and Spectral Normalization.

Computer VisionGANsMedical ImagingPyTorchSelf-AttentionDeep Learning
Project Image

Cooperative Visual Dialog with Reinforcement Learning

Multi-agent system with Q-bot and A-bot cooperatively learning to play an image guessing game using REINFORCE algorithm.

Computer VisionNLPReinforcement LearningMulti-Agent SystemsPyTorchREINFORCE
Project Image

Navigate, Fetch and Find: 2D Environment Navigation with Double Q-Learning

Autonomous navigation agent using Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-Learning, heuristics, and reward shaping.

Reinforcement LearningDeep Q-LearningNavigationAutonomous SystemsPyTorchNELL

Explore more of my research and development work on GitHub.

View All Projects

Latest Articles

Thoughts and insights on machine learning, AI, and abstract topics.

All Zeros Are Not the Same - Blog Preview
FeaturedMachine Learning

All Zeros are Not the Same

Mathematical silence surrounding zero poses a fascinating contrast: while infinities vary, mathematics insists zeros do not.

Explore more articles and insights on my Medium profile.

View All Articles