Career
Engineering Experience
From founding engineer at Amazon to AI/ML leadership at Apple: building hands-on, research-driven ML products at massive scale.
Senior Engineering Manager - AI/ML
Apple
Aug 2026 - Present
- Lead AI/ML engineering initiatives spanning Foundation Model Post-Training, Recommendations, Search, and AI Safety: delivered across on-device and cloud
- Drive LLM post-training programs: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Fine-Tuning, and GRPO - connecting large-model research to production experiences
- Build and grow high-performing engineering and applied-science teams across the post-training and safety charters
Software Development Manager
Amazon - Prime Video Personalization & Discovery
Jul 2024 - Aug 2026
- Led the Outbound Message Generation & Engagement organization (~20 engineers, SDMs, and TPMs), owning customer enrollment, engagement, and retention through personalized touchpoints
- Architected a self-hosted GenAI Auto-QA system on AWS EC2 using proprietary LLMs to validate 500M+ assets/month across Email, Push, and WhatsApp, eliminating manual vendor review
- Directed a massive-scale content generation pipeline delivering 3B+ personalized messages monthly: Two-Tower DNN retrieval and gradient-boosted ranking with time-decay, anti-noise filtering, and churn prevention to maximize CTR
- Established the technical roadmap transitioning the org from legacy systems to a GenAI-first architecture, reducing inference cost by 17% through model optimizations
Software Development Manager
Amazon AGI - Ambient Recognition & Authentication
Mar 2020 - Jul 2024
- Led a cross-functional team of ~14-18 SDEs, SDMs, Applied Scientists, and TPMs; managed the Manager of Managers layer for Authentication/Authorization/Presence teams
- Launched the Multimodal Recognition Engine fusing VoiceID, VisualID, PhoneID, and usage patterns to infer user identity, with cloud-edge synchronization in under 10 ms: a company-wide flagship goal
- Delivered VisualID (Facial Recognition) and PhoneID (Bluetooth Proximity) for Alexa personalization, coordinating across 23+ external teams
- Led Recognition Moments (2023) across five cross-functional teams, substantially expanding Alexa's base of personalizable home screens
- Built the ML training pipeline for Continuous Improving Multimodal Recognition: an online learning system integrated with LLM-powered Alexa+ experiences
- Co-authored the Authentication Confidence Levels (ACL) security standard: Amazon's 6-tier framework governing identity verification confidence across all Alexa devices and third-party developers
Senior Software Engineer
Amazon AGI - Ambient Recognition & Authentication
Nov 2018 - Mar 2020
- Founding Engineer; architected high-stakes identity and security features resulting in multiple granted US Patents
- Architected "Limit Access" on Alexa: a multi-factor authentication system (Voice PIN + VoiceID) achieving HIPAA compliance for Amazon Pharmacy transactions with partners including Aetna, Kaiser Permanente, and United Health Group
- Designed the Person Recognition Identity API for 3rd-party developers, enabling secure personalization of Alexa interactions
- Invented the Cross-Modal Automated Ground Truth scheme (patented) using BLE proximity to ground-truth voice prints, bringing in 100M+ monthly labels
Software Development Engineer
Amazon - Alexa Identity
May 2017 - Nov 2018
- Founding engineer for Alexa Identity; built foundational identity services, human-in-the-loop ground truthing, and offline/online ML pipelines; launched Alexa Voice Training & Recognition: 1.1M explicit speaker enrollments in its first three months
- Established operational excellence mechanisms ensuring low-latency, high-availability voice biometric services at scale
Software Development Engineer
Amazon Web Services - IAM
Aug 2016 - May 2017
- Built the Resource Groups Tagging API enabling tag-based access control (TBAC) at 40K+ TPS
- Redesigned Tagging Discovery Services eliminating single-point-of-failure; deployed to AWS GovCloud with air-gapped security protocols
Software Development Engineer
Amazon - Home Services
Mar 2014 - Aug 2016
- Founding engineer for Amazon Home Services marketplace; designed seller onboarding flows, ASIN search, and AWS Step Functions workflows
- Built a hyperlocal seller notification mechanism reducing customer order claim time by 95% (~12hrs to ~30min)
Associate Software Engineer
Veritas / Symantec
Jul 2013 - Mar 2014
- Core team member on Symantec NetBackup; revamped credential security for remote administration, making the authentication process FIPS-compliant using OpenSSL and X.509 certificates
- Built and upgraded OpenLDAP across 28 OS platforms (Linux, Windows, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX) for enterprise-wide deployment
- Discovered and mitigated security vulnerabilities in the legacy codebase via penetration testing, manual code review, and static analysis tools (Coverity)
Expertise
Technical & Leadership Skills
Leadership & Strategy
Manager of ManagersOrg Design3-Year RoadmapsScience-to-ProductionHire & Develop the BestCross-Org ProgramsZero-to-One ProductsCareer Development
Machine Learning & AI
LLM Post-TrainingSFT & Reinforcement Fine-TuningGRPORLHF & AlignmentAI SafetySearch & RankingMultimodal MLRecommendation SystemsGenAI SystemsRAG PipelinesPyTorchHuggingFace
Engineering & Infrastructure
Distributed Systems40K+ TPSCloud-Edge (<8ms)AWSDynamoDBBedrockCI/CD for MLHIPAA ComplianceJavaPythonC/C++
Education
Academic Background
Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani
Master of Science (Tech.), Information Systems
2009 - 2013