Ketan Palankar

I’m a Lead Applied AI Engineer with 7+ years of experience taking AI systems from research to production across digital identity, fraud detection, computer vision, retail analytics, and document intelligence. I focus on building production-ready AI infrastructure—scalable GPU inference, distributed ML platforms, and MLOps—that delivers measurable impact.

At Airtel Digital, I lead AI platform engineering for digital identity, fraud prevention, and customer onboarding on the KYC platform. I designed an identity resolution platform combining biometric similarity, customer metadata, graph intelligence, and vector search, and I built low-latency distributed pipelines integrating OracleDB, Elasticsearch, and Neo4j. I also established engineering standards for deployment, CI/CD, experimentation, monitoring, and scalable ML infrastructure while mentoring engineers across production AI initiatives.

Earlier, I built production-grade face authentication and passive liveness systems, and I led a nationwide face search platform indexing 400M+ customer images. I implemented Triton-based GPU inference services to reduce latency, delivered real-time retail intelligence across 500+ stores, and developed GAN-based document enhancement plus OCR pipelines. I’ve also delivered enterprise AI solutions at Quantiphi using AWS SageMaker with Glue, EMR, ECS, and S3, and I’m recognized as an Elastic Excellence Award (Global Winner, 2023) for real-time face image search.