Sandeep Kshirsagar
Summary
Experienced Azure-focused MLOps Engineer with a strong track record of building and operating production-grade ML systems in large enterprise environments. Deep expertise in Azure ML Studio components, Azure DevOps YAML-based CI/CD, and scalable deployment frameworks supporting high-volume workloads. Skilled in delivering ML and Azure Services solutions within secure cloud architectures using VNet integration, Private Endpoints, Managed Identity and Key Vault. Proven ability to productionise models with comprehensive monitoring, drift detection, performance optimisation, and controlled Dev, QA and Prod promotion. Known for accelerating deployment cycles while maintaining resilience, governance, and operational excellence at scale.
Overview
16
16
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work history
National Grid ESO
Senior ML Engineer
London, United Kingdom
2022.08 - 2026.02
- Designed and developed enterprise-grade Azure ML platform (PEF) to operationalise energy forecasting products across National Grid for secure and scalable deployment of production ML pipelines.
- Implemented modular Azure ML studio pipelines (data prep,training, batch & online inference) using reusable Python SDK V2 components which reduced model time-to-production by 55% while standardising high-dimensional data processing and multi-horizon inference logic.
- Built and maintained end-to-end Azure DevOps (ADO) YAML CI/CD pipelines to automate model packaging, containerisation, environment builds, approval gates and controlled promotion across Dev, Staging and Production environments.
- Designed deployment wrappers and standardised inference interfaces around models to ensure resilience, version control, rollback capability and consistent integration with downstream enterprise systems.
- Implemented secure Azure networking architecture using VNet integration, Private Endpoints, Managed Identity and Key Vault for secure comm between Azure ML, Storage Accounts, Azure SQL, and Cognitive Services in restricted enterprise environments.
- Deployed high-throughput forecasting services generating hourly predictions into Azure SQL, with built-in autoscaling, monitoring, and resilience strategies to support national-scale operational workloads.
- Established production-grade model monitoring and operational observability including latency tracking, prediction health metrics, drift detection, structured logging, and alerting using Application Insights and monitoring tools.
- Integrated Azure Cognitive Services / Azure OpenAI capabilities into the forecasting platform to provide secure, natural language explanation layers for model outputs, governed by guardrails, cost monitoring and enterprise observability standards.
- Standardised model lifecycle management through versioning, controlled releases, governance workflows, and reproducible deployment artefacts using Azure ML Model Registry and containerised environments.
British Telecommunications (BT Group)
AI& ML Engineer
Birmingham, United Kingdom
2021.12 - 2022.08
- Designed and operationalised a large-scale NLP knowledge extraction platform on Azure ML managed endpoints with modular training and inference components with automated Azure DevOps YAML CI/CD pipelines for secure promotion different environments.
- Optimised and deployed high-throughput inference services by converting models to ONNX and applying quantisation, reducing model size by 3x and improving inference performance by up to 5x enabling cost-efficient, scalable production deployments.
- Led enterprise deployment of multivariate time-series ML services (CSIM) into secure Azure environments with private networking, monitoring, autoscaling, and operational governance that delivered business impact through resilient, production-grade ML systems.
TechMahindra
Lead Data Scientist
Birmingham, United Kingdom
2019.06 - 2021.12
- Developed autoencoder-based fraud system on GCP using a Champion-Challenger framework which reduced false positives by 12%.
- Implemented GBT pipeline to forecast Probability of Default which considers behavioural data to improve the Gini coefficient by 5% for capital allocation.
- Developed a Survival Analysis model to identify high value churn risks which in turn integrates outputs into CRM to automate retention offers and reduce attrition by 5%.
Virtusa
Senior Data Scientist
Hyderabad, India
2018.09 - 2019.05
- Automated the process of directing the customer issues to the respective development team to increase revenue by 20%.
- Automated ML models deployment using Azure CI/CD pipelines and monitored the data drift in production.
Medtronic
Software Engineer II
Hyderabad, India
2015.07 - 2018.09
- Built ML classifier to identify defective piece of signia handle produced during manufacturing using product images.
- Analyzed the reload transactions data and designed an analytical framework that will help customer to identify segments of customers based on the reload usage and, further classify the customers based on the segments.
Rockwell Collins
Tech Lead
Hyderabad, India
2009.09 - 2015.07
- Developed Hmap multithreaded display application using C++ POSIX library on Green Hills Integrity RTOS .
Education
PG Diploma - AI and ML
Carnegie Mellon University
USABachelor's - Computer Science
SGGSIE&T
IndiaSkills
- Azure Machine Learning (SDK v2)
- Azure AI Foundry
- Vertex AI
- Hugging Face Transformers & Scikit-learn
- Azure OpenAI Service
- LangChain, LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, Prompt Flow
- Model Deployment & Monitoring
- PySpark, Databricks Jobs API & Workflows
- Databrick Asset Bundles
- Time Series Forecasting, Model/Data drift
- MLflow, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Kubeflow
- Azure DevOps (CI/CD), Docker, Kubernetes
Certification
- Microsoft certified Azure Data Scientist
- Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer
References
References available upon request.
Timeline
National Grid ESO
Senior ML Engineer
2022.08 - 2026.02
British Telecommunications (BT Group)
AI& ML Engineer
2021.12 - 2022.08
TechMahindra
Lead Data Scientist
2019.06 - 2021.12
Virtusa
Senior Data Scientist
2018.09 - 2019.05
Medtronic
Software Engineer II
2015.07 - 2018.09
Rockwell Collins
Tech Lead
2009.09 - 2015.07
Bachelor's - Computer Science
SGGSIE&T
PG Diploma - AI and ML
Carnegie Mellon University