Nishigandha Karle

About Nishigandha Karle

I\'m a data engineer who builds production data pipelines and AI agents, and brings that work directly into customer environments.At Ascend.io, my work is primarily customer-facing. I present at the quarterly customer bootcamp, lead end-to-end co-build sessions where I work directly with customers to design and build data pipeline solutions on the platform, and serve as the technical partner for customer migrations and deployments, helping teams move onto the platform and adopt it successfully. I also work closely with the go-to-market team, building the analytics and CRM infrastructure they use to track user engagement, identify high-intent accounts, and prioritize outreach.Before Ascend, I spent 4.5 years at Amazon and AWS across three engineering roles, building Redshift data tooling and open-source developer tools, and leading cross-team analytics migrations with pipelines processing 50M+ records daily with automated schema evolution across 15+ upstream sources.I work best at the intersection of data engineering, AI systems, and direct customer impact.

Experience

1. Field Data Engineer (Customer-facing Data Platforms & Ai)

   Ascend.Io

   Jan 2026 — Present · Palo Alto, CA, US

   Presented at the quarterly customer bootcamp attendees) within first month, delivering technical sessions on data platform capabilities to external users and partners.2. Led end-to-end co-build sessions and served as technical partner for customer migrations and deployments — partnering with customers to understand their data workflows, guide migration from Gen1/Gen2 to Gen3, and ensure seamless platform adoption.3. Evaluated and benchmarked AI models (OpenAI, Anthropic) across multiple use cases, selecting optimal models based on performance, accuracy, and suitability for production workflows.4. Built an AI-powered pipeline monitoring agent that generates daily severity-classified health reports across production, staging, and development environments — iterating through three distinct architectures before shipping.5. Designed and built the user activity analytics pipeline — sessionizing user behavior from raw API logs, computing engagement metrics across seven dimensions, and syncing results to HubSpot CRM with idempotent correctness guarantees and 80-90% reduction in API overhead.6. Built the analytics and CRM infrastructure the go-to-market team uses to identify high-intent users, track activation milestones, and prioritize outreach.7. Won an internal hackathon by designing and building a voice-to-text feature, enabling speech-driven interactions within the product.

Education

• University of Maryland Baltimore County

  Master's degree, Information Systems

  2019 — 2021

• Savitribai Phule Pune University

  Bachelor of Engineering (BE), Information Technology

  2012 — 2016