Hey, I'm Atharv! 👋

Atharv as ASCII art

I'm a Machine Learning Engineer who's been building AI for 3+ years. I love creating things that actually help people.

I'm really into NLP and Computer Vision, and I'm always looking for a good challenge to tackle next.

Atharv as ASCII art

Writing

Medium 4 min read

The Strawberry Problem Is Hard for LLMs

A short breakdown of why simple character-counting tasks can still trip up language models, and what that says about tokenization, prediction, and engineered reliability.

LLM Transformers Deep Learning AI

Experience

Jan 2025 - Present

Founding Machine Learning Engineer

Firi
Bangalore, India
  • Do ML end-to-end — data → training → deployment → monitoring
  • Trained a ModernBERT-based ML parser hitting ~97% micro-precision on mapping user queries → Elasticsearch parameters
  • Built a GPT-4o powered review analysis pipeline (fetch, clean, summarize, insights on product pages)
  • Built AI smart search + product recommendations with a multi-agent setup (Elasticsearch + semantic search + Cohere rerank + RRF + LangGraph)
  • Basically turning messy user text into clean signals and making search actually smart
Aug 2023 - Jan 2025

Machine Learning Engineer

Entrupy
Bangalore, India
  • Cut inference time in half (2X faster!) by optimizing the entire model pipeline
  • Built a multi-region shoe segmentation model using HRNet and a custom decoder to handle the tricky bits
Feb 2023 - July 2023

Applied Scientist Intern

Amazon
Bangalore, India
  • Dug into data to find what actually makes new customers stick around for the long haul
  • Built predictive models and used Reinforcement Learning to figure out the best way to spend the incentive budget
  • Got my research published and presented at the Amazon Machine Learning Conference (AMLC) — pretty cool!
Jan 2023 - Apr 2023

Machine Learning Intern

ExaWizards Inc.
Hyderabad, India
  • Used Diffusion models to generate synthetic "anomalies" so our detection models could learn faster
  • Played around with thermal image pose estimation and SAM to push the limits of object segmentation
Jul 2022 - Dec 2022

Deep Learning Intern

HyperVerge
Bengaluru, India
  • Built a global identity verification system using DBNet to spot the right documents every time
  • Slashed latency by 147% and cut GPU usage in half through some serious pipeline tuning
Nov 2021 - May 2022

Computer Vision Intern

Spyne
Gurgaon, India
  • Worked on the messy world of food pics — building segmentation and watermark removal for Zomato and Swiggy
  • Brought models like U-Net and CLIP to life, wrapped them in APIs, and deployed them on Nvidia Triton
Oct 2021 - Jan 2022

NLP Research Intern

VoiceShop
New Delhi, India
  • Turned research papers into real talk by working on open-domain conversation models
  • Contributed to Meta's BlenderBot 2.0 (open source for the win!)
  • Finetuned and shipped GPT-J-6B on SageMaker using Hugging Face
Jul 2021 - Aug 2021

Research Intern

Dr. Akhilesh Das Gupta Institute of Technology
New Delhi, India
  • Dropped prediction errors by 18% just by tweaking a custom cost function for an ensemble model
  • Researched better ways to predict diabetes using data-driven weighted ensembles

Projects

Grammatical Error Correction Model with Dynamic Context Learning

Used BERT model to learn optimal splits within the paragraph/document ensuring maximal contextual information is preserved in the resulting chunks. Achieved an improvement of 77%, 19.61%, and 10.49% F0.5 score on CoNLL-2014, BEA-Dev, and FCE-Test datasets respectively from current SOTA models. Paper accepted at BDA 2023.

View Project →

Glycosylated Hemoglobin Prediction

Introduced an optimized weighted ensemble model that predicts the risk of Type 2 Diabetes. Worked on improving the performance by developing custom cost function for weights. Technologies: Scikit-learn, Seaborn, Ensemble Learning, SciPy.

View Project →

AI Image Caption Generator

Developed an Encoder-Decoder model using CNN and LSTM to generate captions from an image. Encoded Images using InceptionV3 model and words using GloVe. Technologies: Keras, CNN, LSTM, GloVe, Transfer learning.

View Project →

Smart India Hackathon Winner 2022

Won Smart India Hackathon 2022 against the problem statement KK1182 (Shared usage of workshops/labs across india) held at IIT Guwahati.

View Project →

Wins & Accomplishments

Runable X Together 2026 Winner

Built and launched a startup from idea to MVP in under 10 hours. Won $1,000 cash and an opportunity for $1M funding via SwarmSpace by Together Fund.

VibeHack 2025 Winner

Took home 1st place among 120 teams with SynthScene — a project reimagining brand advertising through virtual product placement.

Metadome Emerging Tech Hackathon Winner 2024

Won the Metadome.ai Emerging Tech Hackathon, pushing the boundaries of what's possible in immersive spatial computing.

Smart India Hackathon Winner 2022

Won Smart India Hackathon 2022 against the problem statement KK1182 (Shared usage of workshops/labs across india) held at IIT Guwahati.

Amazon ML Summer School 2022

Among the top 3 students from ADGITM who made it to Amazon ML Summer School 2022.

MLH's Neighborhood Hacks Winner

Placed 1st among 300+ participants in MLH's Neighborhood Hacks with AasPaas.

Coders vs COVID Hackathon Winner

Secured 1st among 600+ participants in Coders vs COVID Hackathon with ArchSearch.

HackISOLATION & Innerve Hackathon

Winners of HackISOLATION by IOSD and 2nd runner-up in Innerve Hackathon, by IGDTUW.

Life

Positions of Responsibility

  • Machine Learning Lead, Google Developer Student Clubs: Organized workshops on Machine Learning, Supervised and Mentored team of 20+ members
  • Founder, Younged: Founded an Ed-Tech platform to teach young aspirants Programming, Designed an efficient and beginner-friendly curriculum and Supervised Teachers
  • Technical Lead, TutorateIndia: Managing technical execution to ensure adherence to budget, schedule, and scope. Designed, built, and maintaining a fully Functional LMS Website for the Startup

Misc

  • I love playing badminton! If you're around the Bangalore HSR area and want to play, hit me up-I'd love to connect.
  • Lately, I've been trying to hit the gym as much as I can to stay active.
  • You'll also find me playing Valorant (diamond rank no dereanked to plat) or PUBG PC when I'm looking to unwind.

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