Irfan Ali

About

Irfan Ali — Senior AI Engineer

Looking for full-time AI engineering work — Bengaluru or remote. Can start immediately.

I want to join a product team and own LLM quality in production. Full-time first; contract-to-hire is fine if the work is real engineering. Not consulting, not founding.

Since Dec 2025 I have been independent and shipping: Stacksift (frozen eval macro P/R/F1 0.771 / 0.869 / 0.795), Reflecta, Godam, 12 PyPI libraries, and 22 Apify Actors. Self-funded, pre-revenue. I want a team seat now — not another company to run.

Get in touchirfan.ali@datacortex.in
Irfan Ali, Senior AI Engineer in Bengaluru

Experience

  • Independent AI Engineer (self-employed)

    DataCortex IQ · Dec 2025 – Present · Remote, India

    Independent AI R&D. Shipped a company-intelligence pipeline (frozen eval macro P/R/F1 0.771 / 0.869 / 0.795), a voice check-in platform, an FMCG trade-ops app, 12 PyPI libraries, and 22 Apify Actors. Self-funded, pre-revenue. Looking for full-time AI engineering work — not looking to run another company.

  • Founding AI Engineer

    Kuration AI · Jun 2024 – Nov 2025 · Hong Kong

    First AI hire; built the production AI platform — workflow automation, structured extraction, enterprise search, multi-provider LLM services with routing and cost optimization, and large-scale data enrichment pipelines.

  • Senior Manager – Data & AI, R&D

    Luminous Power Technologies (Schneider Electric) · Aug 2023 – Jun 2024 · India

    First AI hire reporting to the CTO; established the AI engineering capability, led a multidisciplinary team, and shipped AI apps across sales, R&D, and manufacturing on Azure.

  • Data Analytics & Automation Associate

    Lynk · Feb 2022 – Jul 2023 · Remote

    Analytics and search systems for expert discovery; automated workflows with backend engineering, NLP, and data pipelines.

  • Head of Data & Analytics

    brainsfeed · Aug 2018 – Feb 2022 · Hong Kong

    First data hire; established analytics, grew a distributed team of 10+, and built NLP and data platforms for enterprise research.

Education

M.Sc. Data Science & AI, IISER Tirupati · B.Tech CSE, Alliance University · Exchange semester at ISEP, Paris

Papers: DOI 10.54105/ijainn.a1112.06011225; DOI 10.54105/ijainn.F1106.05061025. ORCID 0000-0003-0022-3047.

Selected work

  • Stacksift — Paste a company website. Get the products they actually sell — with links to the pages that prove it.
  • Reflecta — A three-minute phone check-in that turns a week into a short picture for therapy.
  • Godam — Billing, stock, and field visits for FMCG distributors in Nepal — built for a phone.

Open source

Twelve published Python libraries, including AgentEnsemble, ragfallback, AgentCare, RAGNav. Full list.

How I work

  • -I join existing teams. I do not need to be the founder.
  • -Eval before demo theatre. Written, async-first.
  • -Reply within 24 hours on weekdays.
  • -Full-time first. Contract-to-hire if it is real engineering. Bengaluru or remote. Can start now.

This is my personal site. DataCortex IQ Pvt Ltd is the legal entity for the domain — not a product company and not a consulting shop.

Hiring FAQ

Are you looking for a job?
Yes. Full-time AI engineering on a product team. Contract-to-hire is fine if the work is real engineering — not consulting, not founding.
Where are you based?
Bengaluru, India. Remote is fine.
When can you start?
Immediately.
What do you want to own?
LLM quality in production — evals, fallbacks, cost, and the systems that keep AI features working after the demo.