Profile

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About Me

• Accomplished professional with extensive experience in scalable ML service, back-end software development, and leading teams to develop end-to-end solutions in Banking & Finance, and Education domains.
• 2.5+ years of experience in deploying, operationalizing, maintaining and scaling Machine Learning models in production.
• 2+ years of experience AIOps platform development in IBM.
• 8+ years of experience in both traditional and Generative AI models.
• 12+ years of experience in multiple phases of Software Development Life Cycle including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience.
• Led 12 software developers and 3 QA engineers on a project, and overall, in my career, led 20+ software engineers and 5+ QA engineers.
• Post-graduated from one of India’s top ten technical universities in Data Science and Engineering.
• Certified in AWS Machine Learning Specialty and Azure AI fundamentals. Extensive experience working with AWS cloud. Also worked on Azure, GCP, IBM Cloud, Heroku, and Digital Ocean.
• Well-versed with Python programming language, active volunteer, and one of the organizers of the PyCon India 2023.

Top Skills

• Python Programming
• MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) Engineering
• Leading a team
• Technical Writing
• Solving problems with System Design and Architecture
• Maintaining a happy and healthy work environment

Overall Skills

Experiences

Freshworks (2021-present)

Lead MLOps/System Engineer

• Designed end-to-end LLM Operations platform for the existing LLM solutions.
• Implemented solutions for Model Monitoring, Logging, Evaluation, Versioning, Usage, and Adoption tracking.
• Developed and Designed a Dashboard for monitoring the models’ availability, infra usage, latency, efficacy, and throughput.
• Standardized Creation, Deployment across different production regions in various modes, Scaling up/down, and triggering retraining of the Model services.
• Fine-tuned and benchmarked open-source LLMs for custom use cases, replacing proprietary LLM service and reducing cost and latency.
• Made extensive documentation and design on all the proposed and implemented changes.
• Designing the next MLOps infrastructure for the entire org from Data Engineering to Model Deployment and Model Retraining pipeline.
• Scaled up the throughput of traditional ML services from 50 to 1000 requests per sec.
• Debugged end-to-end applications to hunt down bottlenecks and memory leaks, reducing the p99 latency from 15 minutes to under a second.
• Other than the unit and sanity tests, performance tested the ML application by mimicking the expected production load in the staging environment.
• Optimized large table (> 1.5TBs) MySQL queries, scaled up Database bottlenecks using sharding/partitions and reduced costs by removing old records.
• Analyzed every P0/1/2 outage received on existing applications and made permanent fixes to the root cause, resulting in zero P0 in the last year and only two P1 issues in the application.

IBM (2018-2021)

MCMP AIOps Platform squad leader

• Led two developers and 1 QA engineer and gained domain knowledge on AIOps and its use cases.
• Implemented a consumption-based pricing model for clients, which enabled a pay-as-you-go model. Also, I implemented multiple pricing tiers, allowing the clients to use different versions per their use cases.
• Designed and implemented multi-tenant architecture.
• Architected and implemented end-to-end user authentication and authorization in the ELK stack.
• Designed and proposed multiple transformation options for a unified (real-time + batch) ingestion and analytics framework for high-volume and real-time data analytics, providing end-to-end capabilities.

Wipro (2016-2018)

Technical Lead

• Led a team of 10 developers and QA engineers to develop an enterprise-grade search engine from scratch.
• Deployed the product from PoC to a scalable production level for 1000 concurrent users.
• Reduced the query time from > 5 seconds to 100 ms.
• Converted natural language queries (NLQ) to structured query languages (SQL) for structured data searches.
• In another European banking client project, entities were extracted from the email conversation between the client and the vendor using NLP algorithms. This automation helped the client reduce the headcount of 50 agents.

Accenture (2014-2016)

Application Development Analyst

• Automated complex human screen entries using VB Script and saved worth $40,000+ per year time of maintainers.
• Analyzed 10+ sev-1/2 production issues and built fixes.
• Worked with one of the top 3 banks in the world and gained immense domain knowledge on money transfer.
• Gathered and broke down the requirements into manageable problems to design solutions.
• Conducted the Unit Test, Sanity Test, and System Integration Test.

Tata Consultancy Services (2012-2014)

Systems Engineer

• I have worked with one of the top stock brokerage firms in the USA. I learned about mutual funds and stocks.
• I studied the BRD and HLD to understand the business, technical, and functional requirements.
• I organized and participated with the team to create the strategy for the enhancement and develop the optimum plan.
• I guided and delegated tasks to my junior associates.

Volunteering Experience

• Maintainer of an open-source PyPi package, OpenOdia, with 40,000+ downloads.
• Started a couple of volunteering teams, Odias in AI and OdiaGenAI.
• Led multiple volunteering teams: PyCon India 2023, Odia Wikipedia, and Mozilla Common Voice for Odia.
• Developed Shabdarasa, a wordle game for the Odia language with 100+ DAU.
• Actively volunteering on OpenStreetMap and other education-based causes.

Education

M.Tech in Data Science and Engineering, BITS Pilani (2021-2023)

• Graduated from one of India’s top ten technical universities in Data Science and Engineering.

B.Tech in Electrical Engineering, ITER, SoA University, Bhubaneswar (2008-2012)

• Completed Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering.

License and Certifications

• AWS Certified Machine Learning Specialty (2021-2024)
• Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals (2021-)
• Introduction to ML in Production (2024-)
• IBM Certified Database Associate - DB2 10.1 Fundamentals (2014-)

Patents

• Monitoring of anomalies in behavior to increase quality of software development - Pending

Publications

• Olive: An Instruction Following LLaMA Model For Odia Language on IEEE (2024)

Honor and Awards

• Social Impact Award (2023) by Freshworks
• Gold Learner Award (2020) by IBM
• Offerings Transformation Leadership award (2019) by IBM
• Outstanding Initiative Leadership Award (2019) by IBM
• Recognition Award (2017) by Wipro
• Best CSR Volunteer Award (2016) by Accenture

Languages

• English (Fluent)
• Odia (Native)
• Hindi (Fluent)
• German (Elementary) - A1 level certified
• Kannada (Elementary)

Recommendations

“Soumendra is one of the best development engineer I had in my team. He has huge amount of skills to offer. Be it development, research, documentation, mentoring or guiding, he is first in all of them. He is role model for the whole team in so many ways. He guide team to do better coding. He promotes open source contributions. He is first in CSR activities. Soumendra is full of ideas and suggestions. You give him any task, he bring multiples ways of achieve it and also provide new insights in what can be done better. His coding style is among one of the best. His code, documentation for it, unit testing, integration, maintaining git is very methodical. His code was used as example in our project multiple times to demonstrate how it should be. He is super active in CSR activities and do not shy off from taking any type of tasks in that. In Covid times, he helped community in so many different ways, which is very commendable. It was great to have him in the team.”

— Shaleen Tongia, Integration Architect and Development Engineering Manager at IBM GTS Labs, India

“Soumendra has immense interest in learning newer things around AI , Contributed significantly on Wipro’s HOLMES Cognitive search product, throughout its inception to construction stages and supported the production rollouts . He has handled some of the customer deliveries single handedly , provided the customer demo’s , enabling the sales , improved the performance and accuracy of the Cognitive Search. Soumendra also mentored the junior team members & withstood the challenging times to achieve key deliveries along with quality process.:”

— Arvind Pattar, Head, Cognitive AI Systems at Wipro, India

“It was a pleasure working with Soumendra. He is a very hard working and sincere. He not only keeps himself up2date with the latest trends in technology but also openly imparts knowledge sharing sessions to his team members and colleagues. Soumendra’s ability to quickly scan through a new technology/concept, build a working prototype and do the demonstration is praise-worthy. Soumendra also believes in getting formal recognition for the new skills that he requires, thus has good number of certifications to his credit… Soumendra is a very good team player. He leads by example but doesn’t hesitate to help his team members if they get stuck up. Owing to his pleasing personality and cool/calm work-style, Soumendra handles interlocks/exchanges across the teams very well. All of these aspects in Soumendra’s personality make him a great Technical Leader. I wish Soumendra Best of Luck!!”

— Manu Kuchhal, Senior Architect at IBM GTS Labs, India

“Soumendra was a great guy to work with. He is passionate towards work and was a dedicated team member which made him very dependable. He is a quick learner and grasps the way of working real fast. He has always delivered quality work on schedule which resulted in customer delight. He is a great team player and owns leadership qualities. He is always pumped and ready to take up additional responsibilities. Asks for feedback and makes improvement a habit. Wish him all the very best for his future endeavors.”

— Nirmal Singh, Team Lead at Tata Consultancy Services, India

“I enjoyed working with Soumendra during PyCon India 2019’s CFP process. His dedication was unparalleled as he reviewed most proposals, ensuring all talks were finalized before the deadline. His unbiased and neutral reviews and attention to detail were instrumental to the conference’s success. I highly recommend Soumendra for any role valuing commitment, fairness, and a strong work ethic.”

— Abhishek Yadav, PyCon India 2019 CFP Chair

“Soumendra is well versed in AI/ML, Python, React JS, Elastic Search technologies. Key team Player with very good skill on debugging code of other team mates. His documentation skill on git is very helpful for entire team. widely known for his open source contributions.”

— Avinash Chandra Keshri, Team Lead at IBM GTS Labs, India

“Soumendra Kumar is a very good technical resource. He has strong hands-on experience in all full-stack technology. He is a self-motivated and result-orinated person. He has mentored my team in new technology and he keeps upskilling himself. He is very good team play. He has good data analytics and data visualization skill.”

— Muniyandi Perumal, Full Stack Application Architect at IBM GTS Labs, India

“Soumendra is very passionate developer with in depth technical skills. His coding standards and problem solving techniques are really amazing. He will be true asset for whichever organization he works for.”

— Veeresh Bushetti, Team Lead at IBM GTS Labs, India

“I worked with Soumendra in Wipro on the Cognitive Search platform.His NLP prowess, go to attitude and a positive smile made him a great team member. He is a continuous learner and loves to take newer challenges. He was an asset to our team. I wish him good luck in all his future endeavors.”

— Udit Chandna, Product Manager at Wipro, India

“We collaborated for around 3 years and it was a great honour to learn from Soumendra. He is one of the best in his field and is always willing to lead by example by sharing the best practices. His wide set of skills and knowledge helped us increase our productivity, maximise growth and achieve the team deliverable. He is also very responsible and detail-oriented, qualities that make him stand out. It was a pleasure working with him and I wish him the best in all his endeavours.”

— Aman Jain, Data Scientist at IBM GTS Labs, India

“Undoubtedly, one of the most inspirational and knowledgeable Leaders I have worked with. I had the pleasure of experiencing his leadership skills for over a year and it was easily one of the most eventful episodes in my work life. His technical acumen and the flair to delight the customer is both commendable and inspirational. An ability to stay focused for extraordinarily long duration and unending patience to resolve an issue, is a quality I would personally wish to imbibe and recommend for others. As a team member or a leader, Soumendra earns my highest recommendation.”

— Vishwanatha Krishnamurthy, Data Scientist at IBM GTS Labs, India

“I have known Soumendra as an extremely hard-working and highly intelligent person while working with him for JP Morgan Chase project at Accenture. He is a person who can take up the most challenging and difficult to-do task first. The entire team could rely on him to analyze and automate some of the most complex subject areas of our system. He is highly respected by his peers and senior team members. Soumendra will be a great asset to any team he joins in future.”

— Rashmi Singh, Application Development Senior Analyst at Accenture, India

“I know Soumendra since late 2018. We were working on Multi-Cloud Management Platform (MCMP) at IBM, he was in the India team and I was working out of Austin, TX. We were collaborating on building micro-services to support multi-tenancy for MCMP. Our collaboration started little awkwardly but we developed a good rapport based on our shared enthusiasm for Python. We discussed writing efficent code, design patterns and tools on and off the project. Though our official collaboration lasted for 6-8 months, to current date; we touch base with each other every now and then, and discuss programming and learning related things. I enjoy discussing programming and everything else with Soumendra. And from my experience I can vouch for his programming skills and passion for building software. And he has been a really really nice human being.”

— Vamshi Basupalli, Senior Fullstach Developer and Architect at IBM, USA

“I worked with Soumendra while building the AIOPS product at IBM. He leads the User Authorization and adding multi-tenancy in the application and has successfully done tons of POCs for proving new technologies or frameworks. He has always been a good team player and leads his team successfully for the overall application success. I believe, he will play a key role in the success of any team that he is currently working in or the team he will be involved in as part of his future endeavor as well.”

— Deepak Mahapatra, Senior Fullstack Developer at IBM, USA