Staff
Principal AI Engineer template
VIKRAM DESHPANDE
Principal AI Engineer · Staff
Seattle, WA · vikram.deshpande@email.com · (555) 010-3702 · linkedin.com/in/vikramdeshpande
Summary
Staff AI engineer setting applied LLM architecture across product teams. Owns the shared platform other teams build assistants on, and the evaluation and cost standards that keep those assistants shippable.
Experience
Staff AI Engineer
Cascade Applied AI · 2021-Present
- Own the applied LLM platform used by 5 product teams; set retrieval, evaluation, and safety standards for all of them.
- Designed a shared evaluation service that replaced 5 divergent per-team harnesses and made quality comparable across features.
- Reduced organization-wide inference cost by 54% ($780k annualized) through model routing, caching, and prompt compression.
- Led the agentic-workflow architecture now behind 3 shipped features; established the tool-calling and fallback patterns.
- Mentor 4 engineers into applied AI ownership; review the design docs for every LLM feature in the org.
- Key project — Shared eval service: one measurement standard across five teams, which is what made cross-feature quality claims meaningful.
Senior AI Engineer
Northgate Intelligence · 2019-2021
- Owned the RAG platform behind three customer-facing assistants.
- Built the offline evaluation harness gating prompt and model changes.
Skills
Python · LLM system architecture · RAG at scale · Evaluation frameworks · Inference optimization · Fine-tuning (LoRA, PEFT) · MLOps · AI cost governance · Technical strategy · Cross-team influence
Education
MS Artificial Intelligence · Puget Institute of Technology · 2017 · BS Computer Science · 2015