Portrait of Varun Kumar

Hi, I’m Varun. I’m an AI researcher and an applied AI expert.

I build production AI products — taking machine learning, deep learning, NLP and generative AI/LLMs from research all the way to systems that real people and businesses rely on every day.

Over the past 15+ years I’ve architected and deployed scalable, high-performance AI systems that serve hundreds of thousands of users. I care about the whole path: robust modeling, evaluation you can actually trust, and the data and MLOps engineering that keeps AI reliable in the real world.

I’m happiest working where research meets shipping — turning promising ideas into dependable products.

Products launched at Shoonya AI, Tealium, and Bayer / The Climate Corporation.

Products & Impact

Real, revenue-generating AI products in production — not proofs of concept. A selection of the work that defines how I build.

Shoonya AI

marketingwiz.ai

A marketing technology platform combining generative AI content creation with behavioral intelligence — helping brands generate on-brand content at scale while measuring real business impact through LIFT measurement, turning campaign performance into clear, actionable insight.

Tealium

Tealium Predict ML

A real-time predictive audience and customer-data ML product delivering propensity insights on customer clickstream data at scale. I architected it end-to-end — from modeling to real-time serving and MLOps. $1.4M ARR · 100 customers.

Bayer / The Climate Corporation

Bayer Climate FieldView

One of digital agriculture’s leading farming platforms. I built the ML and data science that help farmers turn field data into decisions — including deep-learning yield forecasting and satellite field-mapping models powering decision tooling across one of agriculture’s most-used digital platforms.

Tealium

Tealium GenAI Agent

A generative-AI/LLM assistant built on a production RAG pipeline at Tealium, now serving 860+ customers. Together with AWS I built an evaluation framework using Ragas and Auto-Instruct on Amazon Bedrock, and balanced cost and latency with a mix of LLMs, function calling and fine-tuning. 860+ customers · ~85% context utilization · ~86% faithfulness · ~76% answer relevancy (AWS-measured).

Writing & Research

How Tealium built a chatbot evaluation platform with Ragas and Auto-Instruct using AWS generative AI services.

AWS Machine Learning Blog · December 2024

A production-grade framework for evaluating LLM-powered chatbots — combining Ragas and Auto-Instruct on Amazon Bedrock to measure faithfulness, context utilization and answer relevancy at scale.

Reports & Publications

Work spanning marketing technology, agriculture, and energy — applying AI and quantitative modeling across each.

  1. Rhode Island State Energy Plan — Business-As-Usual Energy Forecast.

    Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources (State Energy Plan) · 2015

  2. Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) Report 2016 — Part II.

    Acadia Center · 2016

  3. EnergyVision 2030 — Technical Appendix.

    Acadia Center · 2017

  4. Providence Climate Justice Plan.

    City of Providence · 2019

Track record

Proof from building and shipping AI at scale.

  • $1.4M ARR
  • 860+ customers
  • 1B parameter custom LLM
  • 15+ years

Leading applied AI from concept to production

Atharva AI Incorporated / Shoonya AI Pvt Ltd · Co-founder & Lead Data Scientist · 09/2026 – Present

  • Lead applied AI research and product development, taking generative AI and LLM systems from concept to production.
  • Architect scalable ML and MLOps foundations, with evaluation and data strategy that keep AI trustworthy in real-world deployments.

Generative AI · LLMs · MLOps · Evaluation

Shipped ML and GenAI products that generate $1.4M ARR and serve 860+ customers

Tealium Inc., Vancouver, BC · Staff Data Scientist · 06/2021 – September 2026

  • Led design and deployment of the Predict ML propensity platform, generating $1.4M ARR, and shipped a Generative AI Agent (RAG + fine-tuning + function calling) serving 860+ customers.
  • Built a custom 1B-parameter transformer LLM to generate synthetic clickstream behavior, plus a Databricks MLOps pipeline automating model training and deployment via Seldon APIs.

RAG · Fine-tuning · Function calling · Transformers · NER · GANs · Databricks · Seldon

Turned field and satellite data into yield, risk and mapping decisions for farmers

The Climate Corporation (Bayer CropScience), St. Louis, MO · Sr. Data Scientist · 04/2019 – 05/2021

  • Deployed deep-learning forecasting models (DNN/RNN) for seed yield optimization and built portfolio risk optimization models in Python + CPLEX.
  • Developed satellite image classification & segmentation models for soil and field mapping.

DNN / RNN · Python · CPLEX · Satellite imagery

Forecasting and optimization models that informed energy market and DER decisions

Acadia Center, Hartford, CT · Policy Data Scientist · 09/2011 – 02/2019

  • Forecasted energy demand, fuel prices, and renewables using econometrics / XGBoost.
  • Built stochastic optimization models (CPLEX) for NYISO/ISONE market simulation and led customer segmentation ML for DER adoption patterns.

Econometrics · XGBoost · CPLEX · Stochastic optimization

Early research and engineering in energy policy and waste-to-energy

Duke University, Durham, NC · SENES Consultants, Delhi · Research Assistant / Jr. Environmental Engineer · Duke 09/2010 – 07/2011 · SENES 06/2008 – 07/2009

  • Developed PowerOptInvest, a stochastic OR investment model in CPLEX for energy policy research.
  • Conducted landfill methane-to-electricity feasibility studies and waste-to-energy analytics.

Operations research · CPLEX · Energy policy · Waste-to-energy

Education

Master of Environmental Management (MEM) — Energy, Data Science / Econometrics

Duke University, Durham, NC, USA · 2011

Honors: Nicholas School Merit-based Scholarship; Applied Statistics (R) Assistantship.

Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) — Environment

Delhi College of Engineering, University of Delhi, Delhi, India · 2008

Contact

Building an AI product, exploring generative AI, or looking for a partner in applied ML research? Let’s talk.