§ 01 — Chef's Story

A Recipe for Curiosity

Machine Learning Engineer who approaches problem-solving as an end-to-end AI pipeline — ingesting complex real-world inputs, performing structured feature engineering, training transformer-based architectures, and deploying scalable inference systems. 3+ years across predictive modeling, computer vision, and LLM-powered RAG workflows.

Karthik Mannem headshot

Karthik Mannem

Head Chef · AI Kitchen

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Location

Los Angeles, CA

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Education

M.S. Computer Science, CSUN

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GPA

3.92 / 4.0

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Experience

3+ years ML Engineering

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Email

mannemkarthik01@gmail.com

M.S. Computer Science

California State University, Northridge

Aug 2024 – May 2026

3.92 / 4.0

B.Tech Computer Science & Engineering

Vel Tech Rangarajan Dr. Sagunthala R&D Institute

Aug 2020 – May 2024

9.21 / 10.00

Certifications

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Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (Foundation & Associate) – AWS

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Fundamentals of Deep Learning – NVIDIA

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Program Essentials in Python Programming (Intermediate) – CISCO

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Model Validation 2 Expert – Handshake AI

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2020The Apprenticeship Begins

B.Tech CS at Vel Tech, Chennai. First lines of Python — the building blocks of everything.

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2022Community Chef

GDSC Content Lead — organized workshops for 200+ students, led a team of 8.

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2023First Production System

Freelance ML Engineer — deep learning models, Docker pipelines, production APIs.

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2024Crossed the Ocean

B.Tech complete (9.21 GPA). Relocated to Los Angeles for M.S. CS at CSUN.

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2025Generative AI Analyst

Handshake AI — evaluated 1,000+ LLM outputs, reduced inconsistencies by 20%.

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2026Kitchen is Open

M.S. complete (3.92 GPA, May 2026). Ready to ship intelligent systems full-time.

§ 03 — Signature Recipes

Tonight's Menu

Six production-grade AI systems — crafted from raw data, seasoned with algorithms, served ready to ship.

flip ↺
LLM + RAGAI Health Soup

Preventive Care Recommendation Agent

Ingest→
Embed→
Retrieve
+2

LLM-powered healthcare decision support system. Analyzes patient age, medical history, and risk factors to generate personalized screening and vaccination guidance aligned with CDC guidelines.

ADVANCED
LangChainOpenAI APIVector SearchFlask+2
6 ingredientsOpen Recipe →
← back

TECH STACK

LangChainOpenAI APIVector SearchFlaskDockerPython

KEY RESULT

Reduced hallucinations · Personalized healthcare recommendations

METRICS

◈ Reduced hallucinated medical outputs by ~40% vs. zero-shot baseline

◈ Latency under 2.5s per recommendation

flip ↺
Full-Stack + AIFull-Stack Fusion Platter

SplitWise Pro — AI Expense Sharing

Auth→
Upload→
OCR
+2

Full-stack expense sharing platform with OCR-based receipt parsing and cloud deployment. Integrated Firebase Auth, AWS S3, Google Vision API, and OpenAI for structured expense extraction.

ADVANCED
Next.jsTypeScriptNode.jsMongoDB Atlas+3
7 ingredientsOpen Recipe →
← back

TECH STACK

Next.jsTypeScriptNode.jsMongoDB AtlasFirebaseAWS S3OpenAI API

KEY RESULT

Automated expense parsing · Real-time balance calculation

METRICS

◈ Receipt parsing accuracy >90% on test set

◈ Sub-200ms API response for balance calculation

flip ↺
Computer VisionVision Authenticity Scanner

Fake Currency Detection

Preprocess→
Augment→
Model
+2

CNN-based image classification model using TensorFlow and OpenCV to detect counterfeit currency from 10,000+ images with robust data augmentation.

INTERMEDIATE
PythonTensorFlowOpenCVCNN+1
5 ingredientsOpen Recipe →
← back

TECH STACK

PythonTensorFlowOpenCVCNNNumPy

KEY RESULT

High accuracy · Robust to lighting variance

METRICS

◈ Validation accuracy: 97.3%

◈ False positive rate: <1.8%

flip ↺
ML · RecommenderPersonalized Streaming Platter

Netflix Recommender System

Load→
Clean→
Factor
+2

Collaborative filtering recommendation engine trained on Netflix viewing patterns, delivering personalized content suggestions at scale.

INTERMEDIATE
PythonScikit-learnPandasNumPy+1
5 ingredientsOpen Recipe →
← back

TECH STACK

PythonScikit-learnPandasNumPyCollaborative Filtering

KEY RESULT

Highly personalized content discovery at scale

METRICS

◈ RMSE of 0.89 on test set

◈ Precision@10: 0.74

flip ↺
NLP · RegressionNLP Prediction Dessert

BERT Product Length Predictor

Tokenize→
Fine-tune→
Transform
+2

Fine-tuned BERT on Amazon e-commerce dataset to predict product length from titles, descriptions, and metadata with log transformation and model ensembling.

INTERMEDIATE
PythonBERTHuggingFaceScikit-learn+1
5 ingredientsOpen Recipe →
← back

TECH STACK

PythonBERTHuggingFaceScikit-learnPandas

KEY RESULT

Stable regression · Reduced prediction variance

METRICS

◈ R² of 0.81 on test set

◈ Ensemble reduced variance by ~18%

flip ↺
Forecasting + Agentic AIDemand Forecast Banquet

Retail Demand Intelligence Platform

Backtest→
Select→
Calibrate
+2

End-to-end retail demand forecasting system with a tool-calling LLM agent and a full AWS deployment. Per-series model selection, calibrated uncertainty, and a closed MLOps loop with automated drift detection.

ADVANCED
PythonScikit-learnFlaskAnthropic API+4
8 ingredientsOpen Recipe →
← back

TECH STACK

PythonScikit-learnFlaskAnthropic APIOpenAI APIAWS BedrockTerraformDocker

KEY RESULT

7.9% WAPE · won 154/240 series · drift-triggered auto re-selection

METRICS

◈ Gradient-boosted model won 154/240 series at 7.9% WAPE

◈ 74.2% measured interval coverage vs. 80% nominal target

Full Kitchen on GitHub ↗
§ 04 — Expertise Lab

What I Actually Build

Six specialisations. Each one proven by shipped work, not just listed skills.

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LLM Systems & RAG

Production-grade retrieval-augmented generation

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EXPERT

Design and deploy LLM pipelines that answer domain-specific questions with cited, grounded responses. Not demos — shipped systems.

LangChainOpenAIFAISSPineconeChromaDBPrompt Eng.

Proven by

Preventive Care RAG Agent — 38% hallucination reduction on CDC corpus

LangChainOpenAIFAISSPinecone+2
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ML Engineering

End-to-end model development & training

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EXPERT

From raw dataset to production inference: feature engineering, model selection, training pipelines, and evaluation frameworks.

PyTorchScikit-LearnXGBoostPandasMLflowWeights & Biases

Proven by

BERT Product Predictor — ensemble of transformer + gradient boosting for regression

PyTorchScikit-LearnXGBoostPandas+2
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Computer Vision

Custom CNN architectures for visual tasks

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EXPERT

Building convolutional networks from scratch — not just transfer learning. Augmentation strategy, class balancing, precision tuning.

PyTorchOpenCVAlbumentationsONNXTorchVision

Proven by

Fake Currency CNN — 97.3% accuracy on custom banknote dataset with 5-layer custom architecture

PyTorchOpenCVAlbumentationsONNX+1
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Recommender Systems

Collaborative filtering & latent factor models

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EXPERT

Matrix factorisation, latent factor decomposition, and hybrid approaches. Offline metrics that correlate with real user satisfaction.

SVDSurpriseScikit-LearnPandasNumPy

Proven by

Netflix Recommender — SVD with 50 latent factors, Precision@10 of 0.74 on held-out set

SVDSurpriseScikit-LearnPandas+1
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AI Deployment & Infra

Containerised, production-ready AI systems

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EXPERT

Docker, Flask APIs, cloud deployment, and monitoring. Systems that actually stay up after the demo ends.

DockerFlaskFastAPIAWSVercelGitHub Actions

Proven by

All 6 projects deployed end-to-end with Docker + REST APIs, not just Jupyter notebooks

DockerFlaskFastAPIAWS+2
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LLM Evaluation

Safety, accuracy & alignment assessment

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EXPERT

Designing rubrics for hallucination detection, factual grounding, and response quality at scale. Professional annotation workflow experience.

AnnotationRubric DesignHallucination DetectionRAGASTruthfulQA

Proven by

Handshake AI — evaluating LLM outputs for accuracy and safety in production systems

AnnotationRubric DesignHallucination DetectionRAGAS+1
§ 04 — Ingredients Shelf

The Pantry

Every great dish starts with quality ingredients. Hover to explore the depth.

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Category

Base Ingredients

PythonJavaTypeScript
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Category

Cooking Tools

TensorFlowPyTorchOpenCVScikit-learn
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Category

AI Spices

LangChainTransformersHuggingFaceRAGPrompt Engineering
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Category

Data Prep

PandasNumPyFeature EngineeringData Preprocessing
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Category

Serving & Deployment

DockerFlaskREST APIsGit
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Category

Cloud & DB

AWS (EC2, S3)MongoDBPostgreSQLMySQL
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Category

Frontend

Next.jsReactNode.jsExpress
§ 05 — Evolution

The Journey

Seven years. One direction. Every year a sharper focus on intelligent systems.

2020

CS Foundations

Fell into Python at 3am debugging a loop that wouldn't end. Never stopped.

PythonAlgorithmsData Structures

2021

ML Fundamentals

First neural network. First overfit. First moment of understanding why regularisation exists.

Scikit-LearnNumPyLinear Algebra

2022

Leadership + Workshops

GDSC Content Lead. Taught ML to 200+ students. Realised teaching clarifies your own thinking.

GDSC LeadPyTorchTeaching

2023

Production AI Systems

Built CNN for currency detection, Netflix recommender, first freelance ML contracts.

CNNOpenCVRecommender SystemsFreelance

2024

LLM Systems & CSUN

M.S. CS at CSUN. Built RAG pipelines and SplitWise AI.

LangChainRAGFAISSGPA 3.92

2025

Generative AI Analyst

Joined Handshake AI as a Generative AI Analyst — deep RAG workflows, production evaluation frameworks, LLM alignment research at CSUN.

RAGAlignmentLLM EvalHandshake AI

2026

Ready to Ship

M.S. complete May 2026. Full-time ML/AI engineer. Six production systems. Zero excuses.

Available NowFull-TimeML/AI
§ 04 — Kitchen Experience

Time in the Kitchen

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Generative AI Analyst

Quality Tasting Specialist

Handshake AI

  • ▸Evaluated 1,000+ LLM outputs using structured quality benchmarks
  • ▸Identified hallucination patterns, reducing evaluation inconsistencies by 20%
  • ▸Collaborated cross-functionally on prompt refinement workflows
  • ▸Maintained high annotation agreement across large datasets
Sep 2025 – Apr 2026
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Machine Learning Engineer

Custom AI Recipe Builder

Freelance

  • ▸Designed and deployed deep learning models (LSTM, CNN) for 3+ client applications
  • ▸Built end-to-end ML workflows, improving training efficiency by 30%
  • ▸Containerized ML services with Docker + Flask REST APIs
  • ▸Reduced training time by 25% and improved inference latency
Aug 2023 – Jun 2024
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Content Lead

Community Workshop Chef

Google Developer Student Clubs

  • ▸Led a team of 8+ members organizing workshops for 200+ participants
  • ▸Published technical content, mentored contributors in Git/GitHub workflows
  • ▸Coordinated cross-campus technical collaborations
Aug 2022 – Apr 2024
§ 05.7 — Open Source

Beyond the Day Job

Pull requests to open-source projects, with their real status — merged, open, or closed — and what each one taught me.

unionai-oss/pandera★ 4.4kMerged

Supporting sized numpy dtypes (S16, U16) in pandera's pandas engine

Declaring a column as np.dtype("S16") raised a TypeError naming a dtype the user never wrote. A guarded fallback fixed it without regressing the platform-alias normalization the code exists for.

PR #2437 · 2 files · +58 / −1

Read the writeup →
pytorch/pytorch★ 102kOpen · Approved

Fixing torch.fx codegen for module names that are keywords or need escaping

torch.fx could generate syntactically invalid Python for module names like `class` or names containing a quote. Approved by a PyTorch reviewer and open for merge.

PR #191687 · 2 files · +81 / −3

Read the writeup →
pytorch/pytorch★ 102kOpen · Changes requested

Respecting Tensor.grad_dtype when priming optimizer state for checkpointing

Optimizers holding parameters with a custom gradient dtype couldn't be checkpointed at all. The fix suggested on the issue doesn't work for Adam — here is why. Open, with changes requested and an earlier competing PR.

PR #191998 · 2 files · +42 / −7

Read the writeup →
pytorch/pytorch★ 102kClosed · Superseded

Restoring the caller's GC state in PyTorch's Flight Recorder

My first PyTorch PR: a permanent garbage-collector leak in a distributed debugging tool, and a test suite verified against the wrong fix too. Closed as a duplicate — someone had claimed it first, and I missed the comment.

PR #191439 · 2 files · +67 / −24

Read the writeup →
§ 05 — Live Kitchen

What's Cooking

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Current Project

Building an AI project for The Woodlands restaurants

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Reading

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

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Current Paper

Attention Is All You Need (Re-reading for depth)

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Location

Los Angeles, CA

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Available

Full-time ML/AI · Immediate

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GitHub

@mannemkarthik010

§ 05.5 — The Experiment Lab

Cook an AI Model

Choose your dataset, model architecture, and deployment. We'll cook it live.

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Cook an AI Model

Pick your ingredients and we'll cook it live

01 — Dataset

02 — Model Architecture

03 — Deployment

§ 06 — The Archive

The Reading Room

Books that shaped the way I build systems, think deeply, and create intelligently.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

Susan Cain

Reading Now

Currently on the stovetop

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

Susan Cain

Reading about the quiet, deliberate kind of focus that deep engineering work actually requires — a useful counterweight to a field that often rewards the loudest voice in the room.

Progress

~60%

◉Engineering Shelf
select a spine
Build a Large Language Model From Scratch
Hands-On Machine Learning
Designing Machine Learning Systems
AI Engineering
ReadingAI Engineering

Build a Large Language Model From Scratch

Sebastian Raschka

ConceptAttention mechanisms, tokenization, pretraining from scratch.

Key Lesson

“Understanding transformers from first principles changed the way I think about every modern AI system I build.”

◈Thinking Shelf

Mindset books outside engineering. Click any to read the lesson.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

Susan Cain

Reading→

Focus on What Matters

Darius Foroux

Complete→

Make Epic Money

Ankur Warikoo

Complete→

Do Epic Shit

Ankur Warikoo

Complete→

Rich Dad Poor Dad

Robert Kiyosaki

Complete→

One Arranged Murder

Chetan Bhagat

Complete→
◈Philosophy Shelf

Beyond code — discipline, purpose, and systems of thought.

Journey of Self Discovery

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami

Complete→

The Higher Taste

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami

Complete→

Sanatana Dharma

Annie Besant

Complete→

Self Realization

Swami Vivekananda

Complete→

“The best machine learning engineers are not just coders — they are storytellers, scientists, and chefs who know the real magic happens at the intersection of data and intuition.”

— Karthik Mannem
§ 07 — Reserve a Table

Let's Cook Together

Open to full-time ML/AI roles, collaborations, and great conversations.

Make a Reservation

Ask ChefGPT

Have questions? My AI assistant knows the full menu.

CG

ChefGPT

● Online

Welcome! I'm ChefGPT — Karthik's AI assistant. Ask me anything about his skills, projects, or experience.