Kiran Karkera is a Lead Machine Learning Engineer with 14+ years building and shipping production ML and data products across AWS, GCP and Azure, currently driving ML at Personio. He combines hands-on model engineering and MLOps with people leadership, having led teams from ideation to deployment and served as Head/VP of Engineering in startups and product companies. Kiran brings deep applied expertise in NLP, recommendation systems and streaming ML for customer experience and e-commerce, and has built white-box, large-scale Spark-based recommenders and lead-scoring platforms. An active open-source Clojure contributor, he improved core.matrix and Incanter and added tensorboard-style tooling to cortex, reflecting a rare mix of JVM functional-programming chops and ML pragmatism. He’s also an author of a practical book on probabilistic graphical models and holds patents on ML-driven device management—evidence of both theoretical grounding and impactful engineering.
14 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Schooling, Schooling at Don Bosco Borivli
PUC, MPC`, PUC, MPC` at Sri Sathya Sai Higher Secondary School
BE, Communications, BE, Communications at Bharati Vidyapeeth, University of Mumbai
Diploma in advanced computing, Java, C, C++, Diploma in advanced computing, Java, C, C++ at CDAC
Contributions:6 commits, 9 PRs, 17 comments in 11 months
Contributions summary:Kiran primarily contributed to the machine learning aspects of the project, specifically related to model training, evaluation, and visualization. They implemented features for tensorboard logging and weight visualization to improve debugging and analysis of models. Furthermore, they worked on modifying the training pipeline, enabling users to pass arguments such as force-gpu for running the models. They also focused on supporting metrics for train and test loss via the experiment API.
core.matrix : Multi-dimensional array programming API for Clojure
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Contributions:32 commits, 10 PRs, 9 comments in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Kiran primarily contributed to the `core.matrix` Clojure library by implementing statistical functions, including r-squared, pearson correlation, and root mean square error. They refactored the existing code to improve performance, removed unnecessary variables, and added cosine-similarity functionality. The user also updated the project's `project.clj` file and test files to reflect the changes and improvements made to the core library.
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