Vetted Azure Kubernetes Service Professionals

Nishitha Thummala

Screened

Mid-level AI/ML Engineer specializing in LLMs, RAG, and scalable inference

San Francisco, CA6y exp

“Backend/retrieval-focused engineer with production experience at Perplexity building a large-scale real-time Q&A system using retrieval-augmented generation, emphasizing low-latency, high-quality answers through ranking, context optimization, and caching. Also has orchestration experience from both product-facing LLM pipelines and large-scale infrastructure workflows at Meta, and has partnered with non-technical stakeholders to align AI trade-offs with business goals.”

“ML/NLP engineer focused on production-grade data and search/recommendation systems: built an end-to-end pipeline that connects unstructured customer feedback with product data using TF-IDF/BERT, Spark, and AWS (SageMaker/S3), orchestrated with Airflow and monitored for drift. Also has hands-on experience with entity resolution at scale and improving search relevance via BERT embeddings, FAISS vector search, and domain fine-tuning validated with precision@k and A/B testing.”

Kaustubh Rai

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in distributed systems and cloud-native microservices

PA, USA2y exp

“Software engineer with ~2 years at UnitedHealth Group plus CMU coursework/TA experience, spanning backend modernization and cloud-native operations. Worked on migrating a customized open-source EDI system from Python 2 to Python 3 while improving SQLite database traceability via JSON exports, and has hands-on Kubernetes microservices deployment on Azure using Helm, HPA, and Jenkins-based Git-triggered CI/CD. Also built a large-scale real-time ride-hailing simulation using Kafka + Samza with explicit fault-tolerance strategies.”

“ML/LLM engineer who has built and productionized a large multimodal LLM pipeline end-to-end—fine-tuning a 20B+ parameter model with distributed/FSDP training and deploying on Kubernetes via Triton for ~5x throughput. Strong focus on reliability and safety (monitoring with SHAP, guardrails, A/B testing) with reported ~22% relevance lift and reduced harmful/incorrect outputs, plus experience orchestrating ETL/retraining workflows with Airflow across S3/Snowflake/RDS.”

“ML/LLM engineer with Stripe and Adobe experience who productionized a transformer-based Payments Foundation Model for real-time fraud detection at global scale (billions of transactions). Built petabyte-scale ETL/feature pipelines (Spark/EMR, Airflow, dbt, Kafka/Flink) and achieved <100ms multi-region inference (EKS, TorchServe, edge/Lambda, GPU/CPU routing) with strong PCI-DSS/GDPR compliance and explainability (SHAP/LIME), reporting a 64% fraud accuracy improvement.”