// ABOUT
A LITTLE ABOUT MY JOURNEY
I grew up in Bangalore, India, and came to the United States to do my Master’s in Data Science at UW Milwaukee. Most of my five years in the industry has been at the boundary between data engineering and applied ML — building things that actually get used, not just notebooks.
Right now I’m an AI/ML Engineer at Principal Financial Group, where I work on credit risk systems. That means feature engineering, XGBoost models, SHAP explainability for analysts, MLflow for governance, and batch inference on AWS. The output has to hold up under FCRA and FDIC scrutiny and actually influence what underwriters decide week to week.
Before that, at Optum, I built OCR and NER pipelines to pull structured data out of paper provider enrollment forms, cutting manual review by 40%. I also built ETL pipelines that fed ARIMA forecasts into ServiceNow to auto-flag bottlenecks before they paged anyone.
OUTSIDE WORK
I like staying curious. When I’m not building something, I’m usually reading, exploring new ideas, or getting outside here in California. I care about understanding why things work, not just whether they do.
Quick facts
// TOOLS