I build the car. Not a faster horse.

Sarath
Kumar

Forward Deployed Engineer — Sr. AI Systems Engineer, leading a GenAI team.

Research. Understand. Learn. Develop. Deploy. Then again — that's the loop.

Seven-plus years embedding directly with client teams, turning ambiguous, high-stakes problems into deployed AI systems.

Currently an AI Systems and Forward Deployed Engineer at Mphasis, leading the Generative AI team — building enterprise-scale document intelligence in the financial domain, where OCR/ICR and LLM pipelines turn unstructured data into production-grade decisions. Before that: cloud contact-centre modernization and conversational AI for banking, insurance, and retail clients at Accenture and Virtusa. Kore.ai, Amazon Connect, Google CCAI, AWS, Python — the stack has changed, the discipline hasn't.

Experience7+ years
Current roleAI Systems & FDE, Mphasis
FocusBuilding something valuable
Based inBengaluru, India

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

— widely attributed to Henry Ford (the line's origin is disputed and unconfirmed — the idea still holds)
01

MAX

A personal AI operating system built from the ground up — a reasoning core that tiers between fast local inference and frontier models, wired into voice, home automation, and real tool use.

In active development
Tiered local + frontier reasoning, one orchestrator
02

Mental Health SLM

A fine-tuned small language model prototype for first-line coping support — LoRA + 4-bit quantization on Apple Silicon via MLX, a deterministic crisis-safety gate that hard-excludes risk content from the model entirely.

Local-first by design — privacy over cloud dependency
1.5B Qwen2.5, LoRA fine-tuned — gate runs before the model, not after
03

Site Ops Agent

This site runs itself — a launchd service serving it locally, an on-demand tunnel for previewing from anywhere, and a maintenance mode that swaps in a holding page and restores the original byte-for-byte when it's done.

Hardened: dotfiles blocked — .git never leaves the box
Live screenshot of this website
04

This Website

Designed, built, and shipped end-to-end — a full design system, dark/light theming, scroll-driven motion, responsive across every device. What you're looking at right now is the "green" build, previewed live before it ever touches production.

Blue/green deployment — this is green, production stays untouched
v2 previewed live, promoted only when it's ready
05

LinkedIn Publishing Agent

Posted by a script, not by hand — OAuth, the LinkedIn API, and a schedule it manages itself.

Live since launch day

"Responsible AI" gets used to mean a lot of things. Two honest, sourced pieces — co-researched with MAX — on what it actually costs, and who actually gets blamed when it fails.

See both pieces, and what's next →

Three small, mindful games — designed and coded end-to-end by MAX, my personal AI system. No build tools, no tracking, nothing stored. Just something quiet to play with for a minute.

Bubble Wrap

A quick tactile reset for restless hands — eases tension and refocuses attention.

Color Match

RED

Streak: 0Best: 0

Click the ink color, not the word — trains attention and cognitive control.

Memory Sequence

Press start

Round: 0

Watch, then repeat the growing pattern — builds working memory and focus.

Share your score

On mobile, hit Share — the caption is copied for you, so just paste it once LinkedIn opens. On desktop, copy the text and save the image.

Let's build.

Sarath Kumar

Sarath Kumar

Forward Deployed Engineer