Open to strategic engagements & advisory roles

Vipul
Kumar

Senior AI Data Architect  |  AI Transformation Practice Lead

Azure AI  ·  GCP Vertex AI  ·  Agentic AI  ·  Data Lakehouse  ·  GenAI / RAG

Orange County, CA  ·  Remote · Hybrid · On-site

View My Work vk@vkdesignlabs.com
25+
Years Experience
$50M+
Programs Delivered
4
Live AI Products
91%
Diagnostic Accuracy
7
Countries Lived & Worked
Scroll

Portfolio

Deployed AI Ecosystems

Production systems at the intersection of AI, critical infrastructure, and real-world scale.

⚡
Live ↗

Kinetic Core

Autonomous Reliability for Critical Power

Fully serverless Azure-native multi-agent platform for data centers, hospitals, and industrial facilities. Three AI agents (Diagnostic · Librarian · Planner) on GPT-4 + Ada-002 reasoning over IoT telemetry and equipment manuals — raw telemetry to repair work order in under 2 minutes, 24/7. Addresses $9k/minute cost-of-downtime and 14-hour manual diagnostic time.

91% diagnostic accuracy <2 min: telemetry → work order Zero hallucinated repair steps
Azure OpenAI / GPT-4 IoT Hub / Event Grid Azure AI Search Container Apps Bicep IaC
🔋
Live ↗

VoltLedger

EV Battery Intelligence API

Financial-grade EV battery risk and residual intelligence for lenders, insurers, and fleet operators. Composite 0–1000 risk index (5 sub-scores), A–F grading, 60-month residual value forecasting, LTV recommendations with risk premium in basis points, and second-life viability pathway. EU Battery Passport-ready for the 2027 mandate.

142ms median API latency 500K+ API calls/month EU Battery Passport-ready
GCP Cloud Run Next.js 14 Fastify / TypeScript PostgreSQL / Prisma Stripe
🎯
Live ↗

ReSkillio

AI Workforce Intelligence Platform

Enterprise-grade AI career intelligence platform. Upload a resume: get a 5-stage pipeline delivering 200+ extracted skills via spaCy NLP, vector-based gap scoring against 8 industry centroids, a Gemini-written career narrative, 90-day reskilling roadmap, and a live opportunity radar for fractional, consulting, and advisory roles.

40–60% role-fit accuracy gain 100K+ candidate profiles 768-dim Vertex AI embeddings
Vertex AI / Gemini 2.5 BigQuery Medallion LangGraph / CrewAI FastAPI / spaCy Cloud Run
🍛
Live ↗

RasoiLink

Multilingual AI Talent Marketplace

Voice-first multilingual NLP matching platform for the Indian restaurant ecosystem across the US. RAG-style retrieval with FAISS vector embeddings matches workers and restaurant owners across 9 dimensions in 8 Indian languages + English — WhatsApp-native, GCP-hosted, 50K+ active users.

50K+ active users 8 Indian languages + English Voice-first · WhatsApp-native
GCP FAISS Vector Search Fastify / TypeScript React Native / Expo PostgreSQL

Technology

The Architect's Stack

Every layer chosen for production reliability, not demo day.

AI & GenAI
  • Azure OpenAI / GPT-4
  • GCP Vertex AI / Gemini
  • LangChain · LangGraph · CrewAI
  • RAG / Vector Search
  • FAISS · Pinecone · ChromaDB
  • spaCy NLP · HuggingFace
  • Eval Harness · LLMOps
  • AI Observability & Drift Monitoring
Cloud & MLOps
  • Azure IoT Hub / Event Grid
  • Azure AI Search / CosmosDB
  • GCP BigQuery / BigLake
  • Vertex AI Pipelines
  • Medallion Architecture
  • Model Registry & Drift Monitor
  • Prometheus · Grafana · OpenTelemetry
  • AWS (SageMaker · S3 · Lambda)
Backend & Data
  • FastAPI / Python 3.12
  • Fastify / TypeScript
  • PostgreSQL / Prisma
  • Redis / BullMQ
  • PySpark · Apache Beam
  • MLflow · Data Mesh
  • TensorFlow · PyTorch · ONNX
Frontend & DevOps
  • Next.js 14 / React 18
  • React Native / Expo
  • Tailwind CSS
  • GitHub Actions CI/CD
  • Bicep IaC / Terraform
  • Docker / Railway
  • Turborepo / pnpm
Self-Hosted LLM Serving
  • vLLM · PagedAttention · Continuous Batching
  • AWQ 4-bit Quantization (VRAM vs. quality)
  • OpenAI-compatible Inference Protocol
  • FastAPI Inference Gateway · SSE Streaming
  • Groq LPU Inference
  • Qwen · Llama · Mistral model families
  • Load-tested: 1 → 10 → 50 concurrent users
Inference Observability
  • Prometheus · Grafana dashboards-as-code
  • TTFT histograms (perceived latency)
  • Tokens/sec throughput tracking
  • Embedding latency histograms
  • OpenTelemetry · Azure App Insights
  • Drift alerting · Baseline comparison
  • Docker Compose → Kubernetes · HF Spaces
Signature Methodology
Production AI  ·  LLMOps  ·  Eval Engineering

Evaluation is the Product.

If you can't measure reliability, you're not building enterprise AI. You're building a demo.

"When you quote 91% diagnostic accuracy on a held-out test set — what's your eval harness? Golden dataset, scoring rubric, handling agent non-determinism."
91% Top-1 Diagnostic Accuracy 97% Top-3 Recall 100% Citation Faithfulness

The Eval Framework — 6 Layers

01

Hand-labeled golden dataset of 200 real incidents

02

Adversarial edge cases targeting known LLM failure modes

03

Multi-run scoring to account for model non-determinism

04

Stability regression across every prompt and model change

05

Automated CI/CD evaluation gates on every PR

06

Drift monitoring via persisted eval telemetry over time

Agentic systems don't fail loudly. They fail convincingly. Enterprise AI maturity is moving from "can the model answer?" to "can the system prove reliability repeatedly under uncertainty?" That's a very different engineering problem.

AI Evaluation Harness — Production Reliability Framework
Certifications
Azure AI Engineer Associate AWS Solutions Architect Associate GCP Professional Data Engineer GCP Professional ML Engineer · in progress · 2026

About

The Bridge Between
Vision & Production

With over 25 years of experience across manufacturing, energy, critical power, logistics, healthcare, and financial services, I architect AI operating systems for the physical world. From scaling $50M+ transformation programs at Fortune 500 enterprises to founder-led ventures solving real problems in EV finance, workforce intelligence, and critical infrastructure reliability.

My engineering philosophy is grounded in the Medallion Architecture principle: raw data is worthless until it flows through bronze, silver, and gold layers into deterministic, auditable, production-ready intelligence. Every system I build must be observable, hallucination-guarded, and drift-monitored — not just accurate in a notebook.

I've led teams of 10–40 engineers, presented reference architectures to CXO and board-level stakeholders at 12+ Fortune 500 clients, and closed $30M+ in multi-year AI engagements. The track record: 20–60% productivity and decision-cycle gains across every vertical I've touched.

Practice Engagement Model

Phase 0
Discovery & Qualification
Phase 1
Foundation & Proof
Phase 2
Production & Scale
Phase 3
Operate & Evolve

5×5×5 Business / Data / Org readiness scoring  ·  Explicit exit ramps at every phase  ·  Build-vs-buy-vs-fine-tune LLM strategy with full TCO framing

Global Footprint  ·  Lived & worked across 7 countries

🇮🇳 India · 🇬🇧 London, United Kingdom · 🇫🇷 Paris, France · 🇸🇪 Stockholm, Sweden · 🇫🇮 Helsinki, Finland · 🇨🇦 Vancouver, Canada · 🇺🇸 United States
Vipul Kumar
25+
Years in Tech
4
Live AI Products
$50M+
Programs Delivered
40+
Engineers Led
Specializations
Agentic AI RAG Architecture Industrial IoT Data Lakehouse MLOps AI Governance FinOps

Career

Experience

Founder & Senior AI Data Architect

2023 – Present

VKDesignLabs — Enterprise AI Consulting

Designs end-to-end AI operating systems for industrial and critical infrastructure enterprises. Leads engagements of 10–15 data engineers across $5M–$50M+ programs on Azure and GCP. Shipped four production AI products. Achieved 40–60% productivity gains and 30–60% faster decision cycles across manufacturing, energy, and logistics. 20–30% cloud AI cost reduction via FinOps.

Global Practice Director — Product & Technology Innovation

2021 – 2023

Birlasoft

Led global AI/ML innovation labs with 40+ engineers across India, US, and UK. Generated $15M+ in new practice revenue. Architected AI platforms serving 10M+ daily transactions. Directed cloud modernization of 1,000+ workloads — $4M+ annual savings. Closed $30M+ in multi-year AI engagements with Fortune 500 CXOs.

Innovation & Systems Architect — Industrial AI

2019 – 2021

Birlasoft

Architected Industrial IoT sensor fusion platforms processing 2TB+/day across 5 regulated manufacturing plants on 3 continents. Computer vision defect detection: 25%+ accuracy improvement, $8M/year quality-cost reduction. Sub-50ms edge inference across 200+ nodes.

Product Owner — Enterprise AR/VR & Wearables

2014 – 2018

KPIT Technologies

Incubated and scaled enterprise AR/VR and wearable computing platform from 0 to $12M ARR across 15+ global industrial clients. AI-assisted field maintenance reduced MTTR by 40%. 92% gross retention on per-device SaaS model.

Earlier Leadership

2000 – 2014
CTO / SVP — GEPL Capital2010–2014
SVP Technology — Anand Rathi Securities2007–2010
Senior Architect — Synechron2004–2007
Systems Engineer — KPIT / IPCS2000–2004

Education

MBA, International Business

Symbiosis University, India

B.E., Electrical & Electronics Engineering

Bangalore University, India

Beyond Work

The Person Behind the Architect

🏛️

The 2008 Lesson

I was the youngest CTO at one of India's top corporate finance firms. Then my sponsor left, I honoured a loyalty the organisation had already decided to punish — and I lost the role. Not through confrontation. Through a series of quiet, invisible moves I only understood in hindsight. That experience became the foundation of everything I've built since.

🏨

Hospitality Entrepreneur

Alongside my technology career, I built a self-funded hospitality brand from the ground up — end-to-end: concept, identity, operations, team, and P&L. No investors, no safety net. Building something sustainable with your own capital teaches a discipline that no corporate role can replicate. It's that founder instinct — and the community it served — that became the foundation for RasoiLink.

🌏

Two Worlds, One Lens

Raised in India, building in America — across capital markets in Mumbai, manufacturing plants on three continents, and startup offices in Orange County. That dual vantage point shapes every platform I design: systems that work for real people, in their language, under real-world pressure.

Forthcoming Book
A book by Vipul Kumar  ·  Coming Soon

The Invisible Game

The unwritten rules of corporate power that MBAs never teach you

"You were hired for your skills. You'll be fired for your politics. And you'll succeed only when you master both."

Every organisation runs two companies simultaneously — the org chart you can see, and the influence map no one draws. After 30 years across tech, strategy, and finance, Vipul Kumar has decoded the invisible one. This book maps it for the first time — with real war stories, no jargon, and three frameworks that actually work.

Map 1

The Org Chart — who is accountable. Almost no one who is influential.

Map 2

The Influence Map — whose two sentences determine the outcome before the meeting starts.

Map 3

The Loyalty Map — the most dangerous one to misread, as 2008 taught me firsthand.

Read the Series on LinkedIn

01The day I learned the org chart is a lie ↗ 02Every organisation has three power maps. Most know one. ↗ 03Dear Gen Z: the game hasn't changed. Only the speed has. ↗
Work in Progress Leadership & Strategy For Gen Z & Senior Leaders
The Invisible Game — 3D Book Mockup

Let's Build

Ready to Architect
Something Real?

Open to strategic consulting, advisory roles, and fractional CTO engagements in AI systems, industrial IoT, and data architecture.

vk@vkdesignlabs.com LinkedIn ↗ GitHub ↗

Orange County, CA  ·  919-903-4693  ·  Remote · Hybrid · On-site