I started my career when "Data Scientist" was not a known job description. With over a decade of experience - I have been privileged enough to be in the right place at the right time, and put my passion for numbers, programming, problem solving and cloud architectures to great use in my career.In. my previous role as VP of the Applied ML division at Optum, I led a high-performance team focused on AI & MLOps excellence. We were laser focused on treating data as a first-class citizen and driving business value through AI. Today - I am starting off on my entrepreneurial journey with an audacious vision. Something I want to bet my next decade on.I believe that a happy team creates great products, and in my leadership roles, I cultivate a culture that emphasizes autonomy, teamwork, innovation, and attention to detail. By fostering an environment where team members can tackle challenging problems and prioritize collective success, we drive continuous growth and improvement.My daily work revolves around working on semantic technologies and computational linguistics (NLP), computer vision, GPT/LLMs, building algorithms and machine learning models, researching data science journals and architecting secure ML platform backends in the cloud.Technology themes that I am deeply passionate about;LLMs in the wildNLP, Computer Vision, and Distributed AIProduction-Grade Generative AI PipelinesAI Platform Architecture for ScalabilityCloud-Based MLOps and Engineering at Scale (Kubernetes, AWS Lambda, Apache Kafka, ECS, ECR, etc.)Throughout my career, I have successfully architected and deployed commercial AI solutions across various industries, including healthcare, food & beverages, finance, and retail. My experience spans functionally architecting large-scale business process automation and extracting deep insights from structured and unstructured data using AI.I am dedicated to sharing my knowledge and expertise with the AI community through speaking engagements, teaching, and mentoring students and early career professionals. When bored - I like to fall back on Asimov to lead me into an alternate reality.