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Deepak Karkala

@deepakkarkala

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Senior ML Engineer delivering production ML, GenAI and MLOps solutions with measurable business impact.

India

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What I'm looking for

I seek roles where I lead end-to-end ML/GenAI systems, prioritize reliability, governance, measurable business impact, and collaborative cross-functional ownership.

I am a Senior ML Engineer with 6+ years of experience building and shipping production ML systems across e-commerce and IoT, focusing on measurable business impact through robust MLOps and GenAI solutions.

I've led end-to-end ownership of ML lifecycles—problem formulation, evaluation (LLM-as-judge, CI/CD), production debugging, monitoring (drift, SLOs), and stakeholder management—delivering outcomes like 12% higher marketing ROI, 5% conversion uplift, and 60% cost reduction in summarization.

I combine strong research and systems background (EPFL MS, prior research at IISc and NEC Labs, signal-processing patents) with hands-on engineering: Python, XGBoost, LLM fine-tuning, vLLM/LoRA, AWS, Feast/Redis, and production orchestration to build reliable, governed, and cost-effective ML products.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Senior ML Engineer

Mid-sized European E-commerce Marketplace

Aug 2022 - Nov 2025 (3 years 3 months)

Built and owned 4 production ML systems for a 75K-SKU marketplace, delivering 12% higher marketing ROI, 5% conversion uplift, 4% search-to-purchase improvement, and 60% cost reduction in review summarization.

Python XGBoost Sagemaker Redis RAG OpenAI Pinecone MLOps A B Testing

Co-Founder

Spiticart

Jan 2021 - Jul 2022 (1 year 6 months)

Co-founded an artisan-first D2C e-commerce platform and a digital rural education initiative, building product, curriculum and early-stage go-to-market to support artisan livelihoods and scalable rural education.

Product Management Curriculum Design GTM Digital Platforms Stakeholder Management

Machine Learning Engineer

eSMART Technologies SA

Jun 2018 - Dec 2020 (2 years 6 months)

Owned end-to-end IoT ML systems for smart building operations, achieving 20% reduction in emergency maintenance callouts and <10% MAPE for energy forecasting while increasing solar self-consumption by 10 percentage points.

Python XGBoost Time Series Prophet Anomaly Detection MLOps Docker PostgreSQL

Machine Learning Research Intern

NEC Laboratories America

Feb 2017 - Jul 2017 (5 months)

Conducted computer vision research for real-time traffic surveillance, fine-tuning YOLOv2 for tandem motorbike detection and building a PyTorch visual relationship detector to improve incident reasoning.

Python PyTorch YOLOv2 Computer Vision Scene Graphs Research

Signal Processing Engineer

Signalchip Innovations

Feb 2012 - May 2015 (3 years 3 months)

Developed WCDMA/LTE baseband algorithms (Path Searcher, RAKE, Multiuser Detection) and contributed core IP, achieving 3GPP NodeB receiver conformance and publishing related patents.

Matlab Signal Processing WCDMA LTE Algorithm Design Embedded Systems

Junior Research Fellow

Indian Institute of Science

Jun 2011 - Jan 2012 (7 months)

Researched diffuse optical tomography, developing a data-resolution based measurement selection method that increased independent measurements by ~20% and published in Medical Physics.

Matlab Optimization Experimental Design Medical Imaging

Education

Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework

Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Master of Science, Communication Systems

2015 - 2018

Grade: 5.25

Completed a Master of Science in Communication Systems with coursework and research focused on signal processing and communication theory.

R. V. College of Engineering, Bangalore

Bachelor's Degree, Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering

2007 - 2011

Grade: 9.23

Earned a Bachelor's degree in Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering with strong academic performance and coursework in signal processing and communications.