open to freelance and full time work

Vijaykumar Saravanan

I build reliable Data and AI systems that hold up in production.

Data and applied-AI engineer focused on turning messy problems into calm, observable systems. Currently exploring agents that reason about their own behavior.

Chennai, India · IST

SELECTED WORK

Things I've built

Product Categorization Engine

work

↳ manual effort − 60% · Rock Star Award

A hybrid-search + LLM system that classifies products at scale, with a human-in-the-loop UI for cluster sampling and index training.

problem ·
Categorizing huge product catalogs by hand was slow and inconsistent.
approach ·
Hybrid search + LLM classification on Vertex AI, FastAPI and PostgreSQL, plus a review tool that keeps humans in the loop.
result ·
Cut manual categorization effort by 60%; earned a company Rock Star Award.
  • Vertex AI
  • LLMs
  • FastAPI
  • PostgreSQL

Askcord

↳ document-grounded · multi-tenant · zero-install

A branded AI support assistant that turns a business's own documents into a grounded chatbot on Telegram and WhatsApp — no app, no sign-up, just message the business.

problem ·
Generic support bots hallucinate, and answers stay buried in PDFs, manuals and policy docs.
approach ·
Multi-tenant RAG on Google Cloud with per-business Pinecone namespaces and Gemini, answering only from curated docs and refusing when coverage is missing.
result ·
Self-serve support grounded in each company's own content, with isolated vector namespaces and role-based admin curation.
  • Google Cloud
  • Pinecone
  • Gemini
  • Telegram
  • WhatsApp

Hybrid Search Pipeline

↳ hybrid beats lexical & semantic alone

A production-grade product search engine that fuses lexical and semantic retrieval, built on a medallion data pipeline and evaluated with an LLM judge.

problem ·
Keyword search misses meaning; pure embeddings return irrelevant hits — each mode alone under-serves real queries.
approach ·
Bronze/Silver/Gold layers in Databricks (Spark + Delta) feed offline BM25 and FAISS indexes, fused 65/35 semantic-to-lexical and served over FastAPI.
result ·
Gemini-as-judge win-rate scoring shows hybrid retrieval consistently beats single-method BM25 or FAISS.
  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • FAISS
  • BM25
  • Databricks
  • Spark

FleetEzy

in progress

A smart fleet and transport management system, built to make running a fleet simple. Still in build — the product site is up at fleetezy.in.

STACK

What I build with

Languages

  • Python
  • SQL
  • Java
  • JavaScript

Data engineering

  • Airflow
  • Spark
  • Databricks
  • BigQuery
  • Dataflow
  • Pub/Sub

Cloud & DevOps

  • GCP
  • AWS
  • Terraform
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Datadog
  • GitHub Actions

Databases & APIs

  • PostgreSQL
  • Elasticsearch
  • FastAPI
  • Flask
  • Streamlit

AI / ML

  • LLMs
  • Vertex AI
  • LangGraph
  • Google ADK
  • Vector DBs
  • MLflow
Portrait of Vijaykumar Saravanan

based in Chennai, India

ABOUT

Who's behind this

I care about systems that stay understandable as they grow — clear boundaries, good observability, and code the next person can reason about.

Lately I've been building AI agents and writing about what actually works when you take them past the demo.

  • Applied AI & agents
  • Data Engineering
  • Fullstack
  • Cloud & platform
  • Observability
  • Infra & DevOps

EXPERIENCE

Where I've worked

  1. 2023 — Present

    Senior Data Engineer · Ingram Micro

    Building and running the data platform — pipelines, quality, observability, and AI on top.

    • Designed and operated 5+ scalable ETL/ELT pipelines (Python, Java, PostgreSQL, GCP) processing billions of records per month.
    • Built LLM-powered product categorization (Vertex AI, FastAPI, PostgreSQL) cutting manual effort 60%, plus an AI agent for automated pipeline testing with Google ADK, FastAPI, and React.
    • Optimized cloud infra across Dataflow, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, and GKE — 25% cost reduction and 2× faster queries.
    • Migrated enterprise DWH & ETL pipelines from AWS to GCP with 99.9% availability.
    • Delivered 10+ Datadog dashboards and alerting — 35% better uptime, 40% lower MTTR, 75%+ SLA compliance.
    • Two-time Rock Star Award winner; GCP Professional Data Engineer & Associate Cloud Engineer certified.

Education

  1. 2019 — 2023

    B.Tech, Information Technology · SRM Easwari Engineering College

    CGPA 8.8 · Chennai.

    • Admin Member of National Service Scheme (NSS), 2019 — 2023.
    • Member of Rotaract Club, 2019 — 2023.
    • Conducted a UI/UX contest at Pinnacle 2k21, a national-level symposium of the IT department, 2022.
    • Qualified for the state level in Smart India Hackathon (SIH), 2020.

Certifications

  • Google Cloud Certified — Professional Data Engineer badge

    Google Cloud Certified — Professional Data Engineer

    Google Cloud · Dec 2025

  • Google Cloud Certified — Associate Cloud Engineer badge

    Google Cloud Certified — Associate Cloud Engineer

    Google Cloud · Nov 2024

Full résumé ↓

ON MY SHELF

What I'm reading

reading now

AI Engineering

Chip Huyen

Building real products on foundation models.

reading now

Designing Data-Intensive Applications

Martin Kleppmann

The book I keep re-opening. Reliability as a first principle.

Atomic Habits

James Clear

1% better, every single day.

The Psychology of Money

Morgan Housel

Behaviour beats intelligence with money.

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Eric Jorgenson

Wealth and happiness, distilled.

See the full shelf →

OFF THE CLOCK

When I'm not shipping

👨‍🍳

Cooking

Weekend experiments — recipes I inevitably over-engineer.

🏏

Sports

Weekend games with friends. Competitive to a fault.

🎧

Music

A soundtrack for every commit — headphones rarely off.

🏋️

Gym

Lifting to reset. The one loop with no bugs.

WRITING

I write about tech, books & whatever else

Tech, books, random thoughts and a guitar I can't play yet — published on Substack.

Read the blog →

CONTACT

Let's build something

Open to roles, freelance work, and interesting problems. Grab a slot or just send an email — bring the messy version, that's the fun part.