ESC
Kushal Gangaraju — CV
Kushal Gangaraju AI · ML · Systems

Building scalable machine learning systems that are fast, reliable, and useful.

I'm Kushal, a Computer Science graduate student at the University of Rochester focused on applied AI systems, GPU-accelerated deep learning, and production-grade ML infrastructure.

LLM Fine-tuning
Medical Imaging AI
Diffusion Models
RAG Systems
Portrait of Kushal Gangaraju
kushal@portfolio — zsh
About
New York City

I build end-to-end machine learning systems — from data pipelines and model training to scalable deployment.

My work focuses on building practical AI systems that are reliable, fast, and usable in real environments. I’ve worked across medical imaging, retrieval systems, and large-scale model training, combining deep learning with cloud infrastructure and GPU-accelerated workflows.

Recently, I’ve been building systems involving diffusion models, transformer architectures, and retrieval pipelines while integrating tools like PyTorch, FAISS, Spark, and AWS to support scalable ML experimentation and deployment.

What I'm currently exploring: combining large language models, retrieval systems, and generative models to create faster, more useful AI applications.

Tech stack
Tools and libraries I use regularly.
Python PyTorch CUDA FAISS Hugging Face MONAI Spark Databricks MLflow AWS Docker Linux Git
Experience
Machine learning engineering across research labs and industry, most recent first.
RH
ROC HCI Lab
Mar 2026 – Present
ML Engineering (LLM) - Research Assistant Current

Fine-tuned Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct with LoRA (PEFT) for multi-class discourse classification on imbalanced datasets, raising accuracy from 76% to 89% and macro F1 from 0.63 to 0.81. Engineered rationale supervision and threshold tuning, boosting minority-class F1 by 18% and recall by 14% on noisy data.

LoRA / PEFT LLM Fine-tuning
EI
Earth Imaging Lab
Sep 2025 – Dec 2025
MLOps & Cloud Engineering - Research Assistant

Deployed a cloud-native ML pipeline on AWS (Lambda, Batch, EC2) with Docker, processing 2,000+ waveform samples. Engineered an S3 + DocumentDB layer indexing 10,000+ metadata entries for production-grade MLOps infrastructure.

AWS Batch Docker S3 DocumentDB
GH
Global Health & Medical Device Laboratory
Mar 2025 – Jul 2025
Graduate Machine Learning Research Assistant

Shipped an end-to-end video segmentation pipeline (MedSAM2 + CycleGAN) with a Gradio inference UI, automating annotation via MATLAB ROI labeling and eliminating ~70% of manual labeling. Built a Dice/IoU evaluation harness achieving a 0.85 Dice score.

MedSAM2 CycleGAN Gradio MATLAB
IS
Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO)
Feb 2024 – Mar 2024
Machine Learning Research Intern · Sriharikota, India

Developed real-time weather forecasting models using SARIMAX, Random Forest, and Gradient Boosted Trees ensembles. Improved forecast accuracy by 21% and reduced launch delays by ~15% through systematic feature engineering.

SARIMAX Random Forest Gradient Boosting Time Series
Projects
Highlights
Contact
I’m currently exploring full-time roles and internships in machine learning engineering, AI systems, and ML infrastructure.
Open to opportunities

If you're building products involving applied AI, generative models, or scalable ML systems, I’d be happy to connect.

Send a short note — I’ll get back quickly.