About

Pranay Chandekar is an experienced Machine Learning Lead with over 5 years of experience in designing, developing, and producing large-scale ML-NLP systems using Agile Methodology. He is certified in Data-Driven Decision Making and Deep Learning, and an active open-source contributor. Pranay is a contributing writer for Towards Data Science and Analytics Vidhya on Medium. Currently, Pranay works as an Open Source Developer, where he added support for fasttext out of vocabulary(OOV) word embeddings to Flair, an open-source NLP framework. He also open-sourced a template project to train custom ML algorithms on GPU in AWS SageMaker and to host ML Prediction as a RESTful Web Service on Docker Engine using FastAPI. In his previous role as a Product Development Engineer III at Phenom, Pranay led the Learning To Rank(LTR) projects to improve Search Engine's NDCG by 10%. He also leveraged Reinforcement Learning to reduce the A/B testing time by 28%. Pranay led the Personalization On Demand(POD) and the Browser-Based Recommendations(BBR) engine enhancement project, resulting in 55.34% and 48.77% CAGR of the conversions to user engagement ratio. Pranay has a Bachelor of Engineering (B.E) and a Master of Science (M.Sc) degree from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. He possesses a strong technical skillset with expertise in ML, Deep Learning, NLP, AWS, Reinforcement Learning, Docker, Sagemaker, MongoDB, Elastic Search, Search, Random Forest, Python, Keras, Terraform, AI, Redis, Kubernetes, Tensorflow, Kafka, Pytorch, Web, Java, and Software Engineering. Pranay's soft skills include team work, leadership, listening, effective communication, critical thinking, time management, and problem-solving. He is passionate about enhancing search and recommendation engines and leading the design of AI infrastructure by leveraging MLOps tools to streamline ML development at scale.