Punit Koura
Member Of Technical Staff at Microsoft AI
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPunit Koura is a machine learning engineer and software developer with 11 years of experience, currently working on vision pretraining for foundation models at Microsoft AI after contributing to Llama 2–4 at Meta. He holds an MCDS from Carnegie Mellon where he focused on ML and NLP problems like cross-lingual dependency parsing and probing contextual embeddings. Punit has a strong systems background—spanning scalable data pipelines, MapReduce, and production services at companies including Amazon, eBay, and Soroco—and applies that engineering rigor to large-scale model training and inference. He’s an active contributor to metaseq, adding document-level attention and integration work to support model-parallel transformer training. Based in San Francisco, he blends research-grade ML expertise with hands-on software engineering to move cutting-edge models from prototype into reliable infrastructure.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
BITS Pilani, Birla Institute of Technology and ScienceMaster of Computational Data Science, Master of Computational Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University
Github Skills (9)
transformer-models10
pytorch10
machine-learning10
nlp10
huggingface10
parallelization10
python10
natural-language-processing10
testing9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
facebookresearch/metaseq
May 2022 - Nov 2022
Repo for external large-scale work
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:58 reviews, 35 commits, 37 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Punit primarily focused on enhancing the metaseq library, particularly in the area of model training and inference. Their work included supporting document-level attention, crucial for training model parallel models, and addressing related bugs in transformer decoder modules. The user also implemented bug fixes, code formatting changes, and added documentation. Moreover, they were involved in integration tests, ensuring compatibility with Hugging Face models.
transformersdockerscalelarge-scalehuggingface
punitkoura/sentence-classification
Jul 2019 - May 2023
Contributions:1 push, 1 branch in 3 years 10 months
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