Kayhan Babaee — CTO
As Director of ML and AI Engineering at ODAIA, I lead the strategy and execution of the AI and data platform powering commercial and marketing intelligence products in life sciences. My focus is scaling AI from individual models and concepts into durable organizational capability that teams across the company can build on with confidence. I oversee multiple engineering teams responsible for ML platforms, analytics infrastructure, and AI product enablement. We operate large-scale ingestion and feature computation pipelines, centralized feature stores, and production LLM systems that generate explainable insights from complex healthcare data. The platform is built around Kubernetes-based system design and can run across AWS, Azure, and GCP to support reliability, regulatory requirements, and workload portability. We design services as composable primitives so product teams can safely integrate predictive models, decision logic, and AI reasoning into customer-facing workflows. A major focus of the platform is supporting agentic workloads. We build systems that coordinate multi-step analysis, investigation, and recommendation flows across structured and unstructured data, allowing AI to plan, retrieve evidence, and produce auditable outputs. This requires strong observability, execution tracing, guardrails, and deterministic fallbacks so automated reasoning remains trustworthy in regulated environments. Recent initiatives include a production agentic AI platform that plans and executes multi-step analytical workflows over customer data, hierarchical time-series forecasting, and standardized AI service interfaces for rapid adoption across product teams. I work closely with product, data science, and executive leadership to define architectural direction and platform contracts so new capabilities can be delivered without rebuilding infrastructure. The objective is a cohesive AI ecosystem that scales product development while improving consistency and reliability. I invest heavily in developing leaders, mentoring managers and senior engineers, and establishing clear ownership boundaries that increase autonomy while preserving accountability. I stay closely involved in architecture and system design, guiding decisions around service boundaries, data contracts, and operational maturity. While my background spans Python, Go, Rust, and SQL, my focus is designing scalable distributed systems and production ML and LLM platforms with strong observability, fault tolerance, performance isolation, and cost awareness built into the platform from the start.
Stackforce AI infers this person is a Healthcare-focused AI Engineering leader with expertise in scalable systems and regulatory compliance.
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Experience: 8 yrs 6 mos
Skills
- Ai Engineering
- System Architecture
- Engineering Management
- Time Series Forecasting
- Team Leadership
- Mlops
- System Design
- Machine Learning
- Natural Language Processing (nlp)
Career Highlights
- Expert in architecting scalable AI platforms.
- Proven leadership in cross-functional engineering teams.
- Strong focus on regulatory compliance in AI systems.
Work Experience
ODAIA
Director of ML & AI Engineering (3 mos)
Senior Engineering Manager (3 mos)
Engineering Manager (1 yr 11 mos)
ML Lead (6 mos)
Senior Machine Learning/MLOps Engineer (5 mos)
Zemply
Advisor (1 yr 7 mos)
Voiceflow
Machine Learning Engineer (1 yr 1 mo)
Cymax Group Technologies
Senior Machine Learning Engineer/Solution Architect (6 mos)
Artificial Intelligence Engineer (1 yr 2 mos)
FlareNet Network
Research Assistant (2 yrs 7 mos)
Education
Master of Science - MS at The University of British Columbia
Bachelor’s Degree at Sharif University of Technology