Sai Paladugu

Machine Learning Engineer II

Shopify

• DRI for the ML side launch of Microsoft into Shopify's Autopilot
• Own the cross-channel budget allocation model that distributes merchant spend across Meta, Shop, and Microsoft

Machine Learning Intern

Shopify

• Architected an end-to-end ML pipeline using XGBoost, dbt, and Airflow to predict conversion value for real-time ad auctions, generating a projected $5M in annualized incremental revenue
• Engineered an online Multi-Armed Bandit (Thompson Sampling) framework for ad creative selection, mitigating the cold-start problem and boosting aggregate click-through rate by 25%

Machine Learning Research Intern

Valence Labs (Mila)

• Designed active learning pipelines using uncertainty estimation to optimize data sampling efficiency, saving $40k in data acquisition costs for training in sparse-data regimes
• Engineered generative geometric deep learning models (GNNs) for 3D graph-structured data, implementing multi-objective optimization to satisfy 94% of complex structural constraints

Machine Learning Research Intern

Recursion x NVIDIA

• Developed multi-modal foundation models fusing computer vision and high-dimensional tabular data; optimized transformer attention mechanisms to increase inference throughput by 4x
• Implemented domain adaptation and robust feature normalization techniques to handle distribution shifts across heterogeneous datasets, boosting out-of-distribution accuracy by 12%

Machine Learning Operations Intern

Nokia

• Engineered an MCP microservice to standardize retrieval of proprietary data from an internal training-data store, reducing data preparation latency by 60% for domain-specific LLM training
• Built large-scale, Dockerized, Kubernetes-orchestrated microservices to source, validate, and register 100+ LLMs from Hugging Face into Nokia's MLflow-based model registry

Machine Learning Intern

Cisco

• Built an API integrating ChromaDB and an in-house LLM to convert natural language into structured Elasticsearch queries, adopted by 10+ Cisco engineering teams
• Designed and maintained ETL pipelines using Apache Airflow to ingest, transform, and load 5TB+ of data from internal APIs and cloud storage into a centralized Snowflake warehouse

Carleton University

Bachelor of Computer Science (Honours), Minor in Math

Colonel By Secondary School

International Baccalaureate Diploma