Athula Balachandran — Lead ML Engineer

I'm an ML/AI Tech Lead Manager with a decade of experience developing large-scale AI systems at YouTube, Google Search Ads, and Netflix. My recent focus is on Generative AI Safety, where I lead multimodal detection efforts (vision and speech) to identify AI-generated media. This work fulfills a critical mandate to protect public trust, ensure election integrity and proactively reduce the presence of low quality AI generated content ("AI slop") on the YouTube platform. Prior to this, I worked extensively on ML fairness in NLP and search ads formats, developing evaluation strategies and mitigation techniques to address biases in large-scale ML/AI systems. In my spare time, I love exploring how LLMs can support curriculum-aligned educational tasks. I hold a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon and a B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Madras.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a leader in AI Safety and Applied Machine Learning in the Streaming Services industry.

Location: San Francisco, California, United States

Experience: 16 yrs 6 mos