Deepak Karkala

Senior ML Engineer with 6+ years of experience in ML/AI, shipping production ML systems that deliver measurable business impact across e-commerce and IoT.

At a mid-sized European e-commerce marketplace, I built 4 production ML systems:

• 5% conversion uplift via real-time purchase intent scoring

• 12% higher marketing ROI through CLV prediction

• 4% search-to-purchase improvement with RAG-powered discovery

• 60% cost reduction in review summarization with fine-tuned Mistral-7B

Earlier at eSMART Technologies, I built 2 IoT ML systems:

• 20% reduction in emergency maintenance callouts via predictive maintenance

• 10pp increase in solar self-consumption through energy forecasting (<10% MAPE)

Led end-to-end ownership spanning the full MLOps lifecycle: evaluation frameworks (offline metrics, LLM-as-judge, CI/CD regression tests), production debugging (calibration breakdown, alert fatigue), stakeholder management (legal governance, cross-functional experiments), and operational excellence (latency SLOs, drift monitoring, segment-wise reliability, A/B testing strategy).

Recent GenAI based personal projects include fine-tuning Gemma models: an AI Feynman style Kannada Physics Tutor and an AI Scriptwriter (The Office), both published on Hugging Face with custom reasoning datasets and evaluation harnesses. I also built a prototype Agentic MLOps platform: AI agents that auto-generate complete MLOps infrastructure from requirements to production-ready pipelines with database backed job queues, transparency, guardrails, governance and human-in-the-loop workflows.

For Building Agentic AI Products, I have curated technical playbooks on reliability, safety, evals, observability, and governance; business playbooks on wedge selection, adoption/distribution loops, pricing, and rollout; plus guides on agent evaluation, agentic RL workflow, policy optimization, context engineering, and product proposal templates. I have also compiled Playbooks on building production ML, GenAI systems, covering the full MLOps, LLMOps lifecycle, distilling lessons learned from building and deploying production ML systems at scale.

Between roles (2021-2022), I co-founded two social impact ventures—an artisan-first D2C marketplace (spiticart.com) and a digital-first rural education initiative (rumischools.org).

Academic background: MS Communication Systems (EPFL, Grade 5.25/6.0), BE Electronics (RVCE, CGPA 9.23/10.0). Prior work includes research at IISc (Medical Physics publication), signal processing at Signalchip (1 US patent), and ML research at NEC Labs America.