Akshay Bhardwaj

About Akshay Bhardwaj

I lead Data Science & AI at Mechademy, where we\'re building the AI backbone behind Turbomechanica — an Industrial IoT platform that monitors and predicts the health of critical turbomachinery for companies like Chevron, Woodside, and Devon Energy.Over 7 years, I\'ve grown from the team\'s first data scientist to Director — wearing every hat along the way: DevOps, data engineering, ML research, platform architecture, and now strategic leadership. That\'s startup life, and I wouldn\'t trade it.What we\'ve built- A domain-specific AutoML platform on Ray: our first regression model took 2 months to build. Today, one person creates and deploys 20 models in a day — and 80% need zero manual tuning- Production GenAI integrated into our ML lifecycle — automated feature selection, model validation, and deployment recommendations running live across enterprise clients. Not prototypes- ML serving that evolved from 1 model per K8s pod to 2 EC2 instances serving 400+ models — a journey I architected end-to-end- Orchestration evolution: Airflow → Dagster → now Celery + Ray, with our server as the orchestrator- A 50TB+ enterprise data lake (Apache Iceberg, medallion architecture) with 97% query speedup and 98% cost savings vs. Snowflake- Cloud-agnostic infrastructure: deployed clients simultaneously on AWS and Azure before consolidatingCurrently driving 7 major AI initiatives for 2026: a Diagnostic Copilot that automates fault discovery and root cause analysis, Agentic Monitoring to scale equipment coverage per engineer by 10x, ML democratization so anyone can build models, and a unified data lake at 50TB+ scale.I\'m actively hiring exceptional people who want to work at the intersection of GenAI, distributed systems, and industrial-scale ML. If that sounds like you — or someone you know — let\'s talk.Background: B.E. in Petroleum Engineering (MIT Pune) — the domain expertise that lets me build physics-informed AI for the energy sector. CKAD certified. Self-taught in ML through Udacity nanodegrees, fast.ai, and relentless side projects — from building transformers from scratch to multi-agent systems with LangGraph.

Experience

1. Director of Data Science and Ai

   Mechademy

   Mar 2024 — Present · New Delhi, IN

   15+ & - Directing 10 data scientists and ML engineers, scaling to 24+ with strategic hires across GenAI, MLOps, Data Engineering, and Frontend AI. Defined and driving 7 major 2026 AI initiatives aligned with CEO vision: Diagnostic Copilot, Agentic Monitoring, ML Democratization, Unified Data Lake (50TB+), and more- Built a LangGraph-based Diagnostic System automating fault discovery, sensor mapping, and root cause analysis — turning weeks of expert work into hours- Architected a 50TB+ Data Lake with Medallion Architecture achieving 97% query performance improvement and 98% cost savings vs. traditional warehouses- Deploying production GenAI across all clients: VLM-powered Model Validation for deployment readiness and optimal thresholds, plus LLM-driven Feature Selection- Pioneered classification ML model creation with Synthetic data - Expanding the ML portfolio — VAE Autoencoders, TabNet, Deep Isolation Forest, Neural Anomaly Detection — building holistic equipment health views for IoT time-series- Built Automated Curve Digitization via Computer Vision (fine-tuned segmentation + image processing), replacing hours of manual work. Automated configuration from datasheets using LLMs, eliminating manual data entry per onboarding- Evolved our AutoML to production excellence: model creation from 2 months → 3 days → 50 models/day. One person deploys 20 models daily; 80% production-ready out of the box — driven by Automated Feature Selection, Validation, and Parallelized HPO. Reduced minimum data requirement from 2 years to ~3 months while improving model quality.Key clients: Chevron, Berkshire Hathway, Woodside LNG, INPEX, etc

Education

• Udacity

  Machine Learning Advanced Nanodegree, Machine Learning

  2018 — 2018

• Udacity

  Data Engineering Nanodegree, Data Engineering

  2020 — 2021

• Udacity

  Machine Learning Foundation Nanodegree, Machine Learning

  2017 — 2018

• Udacity

  Machine Learning Basic Nanodegree, Machine Learning

  2018 — 2018

• Udacity

  Cloud DevOps Engineer, Cloud Technologies

  2020 — 2020

• Maharashtra Institute of Technology

  Bachelor's Degree, Petroleum Engineering

  2012 — 2016