Ankush K. Mulkar
Engineering Manager | AI Product Engineering | LLM & Cloud Systems
ankushmulkar@gmail.com•+91 9028621757•linkedin.com/in/ankushmulkar•ankushmulkar.com•github.com/AnkushMulkar
PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY
Engineering Manager with extensive hands-on experience across AI/ML and NLP, building and operating AI-powered products at AllyNerds since February 2024. Progressed from AI Engineer to Technical Lead to Engineering Manager, leading a five-person engineering team with direct reports. Owned hiring, performance management, engineering roadmap, technical direction, and production operations while working closely with the Founder and CEO. Hands-on background in LLM applications, RAG, AI agents, Python/FastAPI, cloud infrastructure, and end-to-end product delivery.
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Engineering Manager | AllyNerds
Feb 2026 – Present- Led a five-person engineering team with direct reports, overseeing hiring, performance management, coaching, technical execution, and day-to-day delivery.
- Owned the engineering roadmap with the Founder and CEO, translating business priorities into technical plans, scoped releases, and execution priorities.
- Directed architecture and delivery across AI services, backend APIs, data stores, AWS infrastructure, deployment, security, monitoring, and production operations.
- Owned production reliability and incident response, using monitoring and operational feedback to prioritize fixes, improve stability, and guide release decisions.
- Evaluated LLM and infrastructure approaches across response latency, operating cost, reliability, scalability, and engineering effort to make practical architecture decisions.
- Partnered with product and growth functions on product analytics, user behaviour insights, experimentation, and initiatives targeting the US university market.
- Delivered and operated AI-powered product capabilities from technical design through deployment, monitoring, and ongoing optimization.
Technical Lead | AllyNerds
Dec 2024 – Jan 2026- Led engineering execution across AI, backend, frontend, infrastructure, and deployment, translating product requirements into implementation plans and technical solutions.
- Designed and delivered LLM-powered capabilities and retrieval workflows using Python, FastAPI, model APIs, RAG, and vector search.
- Architected and operated AWS infrastructure for production AI services, using EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, CloudWatch, Docker, and PostgreSQL.
- Established CI/CD, testing, monitoring, and security practices that improved release reliability and supported production delivery.
- Worked across the full product lifecycle, from technical discovery and architecture through implementation, deployment, debugging, and production support.
AI Engineer | AllyNerds
Feb 2024 – Dec 2024- Built AI features and FastAPI backend services for an AI-powered career platform, including LLM applications, RAG pipelines, and automation workflows.
- Integrated model providers with PostgreSQL and Redis to support AI-driven application workflows and user experiences.
- Deployed containerized AI workloads on AWS and improved reliability and performance through testing, monitoring, and production debugging.
- Collaborated across product and engineering to translate user and business requirements into production-ready AI capabilities.
NLP Engineer | TechAxenic
Oct 2022 – Oct 2023- Built NLP solutions for document intelligence, chatbots, classification, and enterprise AI assistants.
- Developed BERT-based pipelines for information extraction, semantic search, and language understanding.
- Worked across model development, preprocessing, evaluation, and integration of NLP capabilities into application workflows.
Machine Learning Intern | Bhaskar Solutions
Jan 2022 – May 2022- Built machine learning models and preprocessing workflows for business use cases and evaluated model performance and deployment approaches.
TECHNICAL SKILLS
AI & ML: LLM Applications, RAG, AI Agents, NLP, LLM Integration, Prompt Engineering, BERT, Semantic Search
Languages & Frameworks: Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, SQL, FastAPI, Node.js, React, Next.js
Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, CloudWatch, Docker, GitHub Actions
Data & AI Infrastructure: PostgreSQL, Redis, ChromaDB, Vector Search
Engineering: REST APIs, CI/CD, Testing, Monitoring, Security, Performance Optimization, Production Operations
OPEN SOURCE & CONTRIBUTIONS
- PulseRevOps AI: Built and open-sourced an autonomous B2B SaaS revenue preservation and churn detection engine (React 18, TypeScript, Node.js, Gemini 1.5 Pro). Processes usage telemetry, synthesizes hybrid AI risk diagnostics, and triggers automated retention playbooks.
https://github.com/AnkushMulkar/pulse-revops-ai - AgentSentinel AI: Developed an enterprise observability and security platform for autonomous LLM agents (OpenTelemetry, React, Node.js). Implements distributed flamegraph tracing for agent loops, automated PII/prompt injection guardrails, and multi-model FinOps token cost tracking.
https://github.com/AnkushMulkar/agent-sentinel-ai - AI Research: Collaborating with a small research group on observation-driven AI research, developing and proposing original observations, practical insights, and research directions aimed at contributing meaningful perspectives to the AI industry and future publications.
https://github.com/AnkushMulkar/ai-research-lab - Vertical Combinator (Sept 2026 – Present): Founder of a practical builder school and incubator lab focused on making students, graduates, and aspiring founders industry-ready through hands-on AI engineering, startup MVPs, and verified proof-of-work.
https://www.verticalcombinator.com/
EDUCATION
- Master of Science, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (NLP)
Liverpool John Moores University | 2023 - Executive PG Program, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
IIIT Bangalore | 2021 - 2023 - Bachelor of Engineering, Electrical Engineering
Nagpur University | 2011 - 2014