Ayush Kumar — Lead ML Engineer

**** Curiosity x Product x AI/ML Research x Strategy x Impact **** I have built AI systems for 0->1, 1->10 journey — with 10 years of industry experience in converting said and unsaid business problems into ML formulations and deploying AI/ML systems at scale for real-life human language (majority of experience in dialog systems and conversational domain), for products used by thousands of human agents and supervisors. My journey has woven through the evolution of machine learning: starting with classical models (SVM, LR, RF) and advancing through LSTM → BERT/Transformers → Large Language Models → GenAI Agents. Across this arc, my focus has always been on understanding how to represent/encode the data, where models fail in practice, why they fail, and how to pre-emptively address those failure modes so that systems deliver reliable impact at scale. As a Senior Manager at Observe.AI, a conversation intelligence platform that has raised $213M+ in funding and serves 350+ enterprises globally across industries, I’ve led the team of ML Engineers and Scientists along with data annotation group, who together contributed to the growth of ML applied research and product integrations from early team stages through organizational scaling and product maturation. My leadership has consistently synthesized strategic foresight, empirical rigor, and cross-functional execution — anticipating bottlenecks before they become risks and translating research into frameworks, tools, and insights that inform product roadmaps and engineering prioritization. Over the years, I’ve worn many hats across research and engineering, discovery, and strategic guidance— primarily influencing the product directions by bridging the art-of-possibility in AI with genuinely useful user experiences via AI products. Along the way, I’ve published 20+ peer-reviewed papers across premier NLP and speech venues (EMNLP, NAACL, Interspeech, ICASSP — including main, workshop, industry, and demo tracks), and contributed to 1 granted patent and 1 filed patent — all rooted in real conversational data and brought in innovation and differentiation that matter to users and enterprises.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS AI/ML expert with a focus on conversational systems.

Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Experience: 11 yrs 7 mos