Prassanna Ravishankar
Machine Learning Engineer
Solving problems using machine learning across the {data, modelling, infrastructure} stack.
Experience
Principal MLOps Engineer + Platforms Team Lead
Jan 2023 – Present Papercup AI  • London, U.K. 
 - Designed and led the ML cloud training stack from scratch with ClearML and Skypilot, scaling compute from 16 to 50 GPUs.
 - Led an initiative to migrate the model serving stack to be serverless, reducing idle cost time by 90%. Built an internal library to create consistent interfaces, conventions and OpenTelemetry tracing.
 - Designed and led an initiative to increase data processing speeds by 50x using Apache Beam with GCP's Dataflow using 250+ GPUs.
 - Implemented a tool using GPT-4 and LangChain to automate creative text generation, reducing data acquisition time from ~4 months to ~2 weeks.
 - Automated and productionized a transcription and translation workflow using Deepgram, GPT-4, LangChain, Temporal, FastAPI and Streamlit, allowing the asynchronous system to serve 1000% more workflows per day.
 - Created the foundational Platforms team (SREs, MLOps, Data Engineers) and hired two MLOps engineers to the team.
 
Senior Machine Learning Engineer
Oct 2020 – Jan 2023 Zenith AI (Acquired by Opentrons)  • Belfast, U.K. 
 - Founding engineering team member, company acquired after 9 months.
 - Reduced cumulative QA build time from 2800 minutes to 200 minutes per week by optimizing Docker builds.
 - Designed an async queue-based graph executor reducing ML load time from 3 hours to 35 minutes.
 - Led a team implementing secure self-service ML web app deployments, cutting wait times from 3 days to 15 minutes.
 
Applied Computer Vision Researcher
Sep 2019 – Oct 2020 AnyVision (Now Oosto)  • Belfast, U.K. 
 - Developed a Focus of Attention system for retail using 3D geometry and depth estimation.
 - Built a defect classification prototype in 48 hours, later piloted by a major electrical company.
 
Skills
Programming
 PythonTerraformC++ 
 Frameworks
 PyTorchTemporalScikit-LearnSageMakerLightningFastAPIStreamlitHugging FaceLangChainONNX 
 Tools
 DockerAWSNVIDIAGitDagster/AirflowGCPApache BeamKubernetesGrafana 
 Education
PhD Student and Teaching Assistant
May 2013 – Feb 2017 Computer Vision Center  • Barcelona, Spain 
 Implemented Slither, a random forest framework for semantic segmentation using C++ and Python.
MSc. Computer Vision
Sep 2011 – Sep 2012 University of Sheffield  • Sheffield, U.K. 
 Worked on face recognition, traffic analysis, and FPGA-based cryptography.