Available for select opportunities

Akshit Karanam

AI Engineer — Singapore

I build the systems that decide which model gets used, and evaluate whether they should be trusted. My work sits between production AI engineering and applied ML research — LLM evaluation, agentic pipelines, and full-stack delivery.

MSD International — AI Engineer SMU — MITB (AI Track), in progress NTU — BSc Data Science & AI
01 / About

Profile

An AI/ML/DS specialist with strong expertise across machine learning, NLP, and bioinformatics, working as an AI Engineer at MSD. My hands-on experience spans generative AI applications — agentic orchestration, LLM evaluation, applied AI research, and automation — blending modern generative AI techniques with traditional logic to build practical, data-driven solutions.

Currently pursuing a part-time Master of IT in Business (AI Track) at Singapore Management University, with an undergraduate background in Data Science & AI from NTU. I'm comfortable moving between research contexts (SMU coursework, comparative studies) and production contexts (MSD deployments, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code) — and I try to keep both grounded in the same standard: results that hold up under scrutiny, not just look good in a slide.

Location
Singapore
Languages
Python, Java, C/C++
Certifications
AWS AI Practitioner, Java SE8 Associate
Focus areas
LLM evaluation, agentic AI, applied NLP, MLOps
02 / Experience

Work history

AI Engineer Current
Jun 2025 — Present
MSD International GmbH
  • Rapidly prototyping GenAI POCs/MVPs and supporting production deployments on AWS and Cloud Foundry to accelerate solution delivery.
  • Document translation & evaluation — assessed Google NMT and LLM-based approaches; integrated Translation Memory and glossaries to improve domain-specific accuracy and consistency.
  • Built a GenAI agentic document extraction pipeline for adverse events, pulling structured data from PDFs and scanned forms with variable layouts, mapped to the target database schema using LangChain.
  • Automated quality-control checks for regulatory submissions, reducing manual QC effort from ~1 week to ~2 hours.
  • Ran internal sharing sessions for agentic AI upskilling.
Research AI Scientist
Jan 2025 — Jun 2025
MSD International GmbH
  • Led internal LLM evaluation — designed an Elo-style ranking system for head-to-head model comparisons across benchmark categories.
  • Authored model cards summarising performance trends, domain strengths/weaknesses, and enterprise readiness.
  • Built interactive Power BI dashboards for stakeholders to filter by domain and core capability (reasoning, coding, multilingual) to guide model selection.
Research Data Scientist
Jul 2024 — Dec 2024
MSD International GmbH
  • Conducted large-scale epidemiological analyses using UK Biobank; built reproducible pipelines for biomarker discovery in cognitive decline.
  • Modelled cognitive outcomes alongside anatomical (hippocampal volume, retinal features) and blood-based variables to identify predictive and response biomarkers.
  • Refined control cohorts using domain-informed thresholding to improve signal clarity for downstream analysis.
NLP Intern
Jan 2023 — May 2023
Synapxe Pte. Ltd
  • Worked on automatically identifying drug–adverse event relationships from unstructured clinical notes.
  • Built and trained deep learning models in PyTorch, and worked with transformer architectures (BERT, T5, GPT-3, Sentence Transformers) via Hugging Face.
  • Investigated prompt-based learning applicability for the use case and delivered a knowledge-sharing session to upskill the team.
03 / Projects

Selected work

LLM Benchmarking & Evaluation

coverage across 11 benchmark categories, incomplete by design

Researching how to benchmark LLMs against public benchmarks and internal gold-standard datasets — determining which benchmarks matter to the company, and how to route the right model to the right use case. Part of the AI Safety, Security & Ethics group; evaluates LLM safety around harmful, biased, or unfair outputs, and assesses agent-specific risks (prompt injection, remote code execution, data protection).

Elo / Bradley-Terry ranking LangChain retrieval agent AI safety
Read the full case study

Neural Machine Translation

English → Chinese

RAG-based retrieval POC combining fuzzy TMX matching, NER, longest-common-substring glossary lookup, and TMX-over-glossary precedence. Extending toward a self-evolving loop that updates TMX from post-translation edits, with RLHF/DPO under investigation.

LangGraphRLHF
Read the full case study

Adverse Event Case Intake

proof of concept

Extracted structured data from unstructured, scanned, handwritten, or typed patient intake forms. Compared traditional OCR, LLM-based OCR, and general-purpose LLMs to pick the best-performing method, then mapped outputs to the backend schema.

OCRAutomation
Read the full case study

Self-Evolving Magentic Orchestration

SMU research, 7 benchmarks

Comparative study of memory-augmentation, skill-library, and RL-based routing as alternatives to retraining a frozen base model — evaluated across DROP, MMLU, GAIA, and four others. Built the Magentic orchestration layer and ran the baseline evaluations that the three strategies are compared against.

Multi-agent systemsMagentic-One

AI-Driven Risk Intelligence for INTERPOL Fugitives

SMU, Grade A

Automated screening against the INTERPOL 2026 fugitive database, replacing manual similarity matching with auditable, tiered risk scores. Trained a custom Vision Transformer to produce disguise-robust image embeddings for reliable similarity search under adversarial appearance changes.

Vision TransformerEmbeddings
04 / Skills

Key skills

Languages

  • Python
  • Java
  • C / C++

ML & AI

  • Machine learning
  • Deep learning
  • TensorFlow / PyTorch
  • Generative AI (text/image)
  • LangChain, agentic orchestration

Classical / statistical

  • Supervised / unsupervised
  • Ensemble models
  • Scikit-learn

Engineering

  • Flask / Jinja, Node, React
  • CI/CD, GitHub Actions
  • IaC (Terraform)
  • Agile / SDLC
05 / Education

Academic background

Singapore Management University
Master of IT in Business (MITB), AI Track — GPA 3.60/4.0 — part-time
Aug 2025 — Present
Nanyang Technological University
BSc Data Science & Artificial Intelligence (Honours) — Minor in Entrepreneurship
Best NLP Project, MLDA-EEE Hackathon 2022
Aug 2020 — May 2024