Darpan Jain

Lead Machine Learning Engineer with 9+ years of experience building products in Applied NLP and Large Language Models (LLMs).

Currently driving Personalization & AI Enablement at Crunchyroll (Sony Pictures Entertainment).

Explore My Work

Work Experience

Crunchyroll(Sony Pictures) Jan 2024 - Ongoing Lead Machine Learning Engineer

Building personalized experiences and recommendation systems to serve 21M+ anime fans. Driving AI Enablement and Governance across Crunchyroll to enable responsible and safe use of Agentic Systems and Generative AI.

Visit CrunchyrollVisit Sony Pictures

  • As the first Machine Learning Engineer, my role at Crunchyroll leads to involvement in several AI initiatives across the organization, leveraging proprietary data and covering a wide range of teams and business verticals.
  • Recommendations & Personalization Platform: Leading the development of the content discovery platform, serving unique engagement experiences for over 21 million anime fans.
  • AI Platform: Architected a centralized AI platform for enabling applications including multilingual synopsis generation, translation for content globalization, and internal knowledge discovery through agentic RAGs.
  • Building services within the AI platform for fine-tuning, hosting LLMs and multimodal models, ingesting and maintaining vector stores, incorporating human feedback, and serving inference for production-scale traffic.
Pixstory March 2023 - Feb 2024 Lead Machine Learning Engineer

Built in-house conversational RAG-based search for 72K monthly users with hallucination and misinformation safeguards.

Visit Pixstory

  • Spearheaded Pixstory’s RAG-based Conversational Search, providing precise user query responses grounded in verified knowledge bases. Deployed in production within 5 months, serving queries for over 72K monthly users.
  • Implemented systems to mitigate hallucination and misinformation from self-hosted Large Language Models (LLMs) generations through rigorous evaluations and re-ranking trusted sources for reliable information retrieval.
Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI) Jan 2022 - July 2023 Applied Research Engineer

Built multilingual dialogue agents and toxicity interventions for social media sites like Reddit. Research published at NAACL 2024.

Visit Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI)

  • Led development of conflict resolution dialogue agents for DARPA’s Civil Sanctuary Program, as an Applied Researcher with the Natural Language group (CUTE LAB NAME) at USC-ISI.
  • Designed and deployed a scalable chatbot for mitigating toxic behavior on social media through non-violent communication strategies, using a system of pre-trained and fine-tuned LLMs generation capabilities; also including prompting GPT-3’s advanced transformer-based generations.
  • Moderated over 15k multilingual Reddit posts with 85% true positive rate in French and German on popular subreddits.
  • You can find the published research paper here, presented at NAACL 2024.
Warner Bros. Discovery Sept 2020 - August 2021 Software Development Engineer - Machine Learning

Helped build the first recommendations system powering Discovery+ to drive user engagement. Built distributed ML pipelines, A/B experiments, and ad-insertion systems.

Visit Warner Bros. Discovery

  • Boosted user engagement on Discovery+ as part of the “Personalization and Recommendations” team.
  • Employed Apache Spark and Airflow to build efficient ETL pipelines in a distributed environment, and executed A/B tests to validate and refine new recommendation features for the Discovery+ platform.
  • Led the development of server-side ad-insertion SDKs for Android and Web, driving increased ad revenue for Discovery+ sports content in Europe.
AdSparx Inc(acquired by Warner Bros. Discovery) March 2019 - Sept 2020 Machine Learning Engineer

Built production computer-vision and forecasting systems for personalized server-side ad ingestion (SSAI) at scale.

Visit AdSparx Inc

  • Spearheaded the research, design, and development of MiDAS, a micro-service-based system serving personalized ads to millions of users on OTT platforms.
  • Designed and trained Computer Vision models with TensorFlow, deployed on Kubernetes to enable dynamic server-side ad-insertion for 40+ channels, boosting revenue for U.S. publishers.
  • Developed a tool to automate the dataset annotation process, by leveraging SCTE-35 markers in HLS and DASH streams.
  • Leveraged multi-step recurrent networks on time series data for ad break forecasting. This resulted in a 30% reduction in resource consumption and network calls to the SSAI backend.
  • Member of the senior development team at AdSparx that was acquired by Warner Bros. Discovery in September 2020.
IoTIoT May 2018 - Jan 2019 Machine Learning Engineer

Led a 30-person team to build edge-AI products for face and voice recognition, analytics, and interactive experiences.

  • Led and mentored a team of 30 for catering Machine Learning applications with on-Edge capabilities, for Embedded Linux platforms.
  • Developed a crowd flow analysis product using face and voice recognition for event registration, optimized for on-chip GPUs to showcase AI-on-Edge computing capabilities.
  • Worked on Pose estimation for detection and tracking of human body pose to create an immersive experience for users for a video gaming platform.

Consulting Projects

USC Dornsife Jan 2024 - Sept 2025 Lead Research Engineer

Research to build self-hosted AI systems for education, that evaluates teaching fidelity, matching human reviewers at scale for the Pathways-to-Success program.

Visit USC Dornsife

  • Led the development of an end-to-end system for evaluating teacher fidelity in the Pathways-to-Success (funded by the U.S. Department of Education) program at USC Mind and Society Center, applying Identity-Based Motivation principles in classrooms across the United States.
  • Constructed a pipeline using self-hosted inference models for audio extraction and transcription, and LLM-based fidelity evaluation models to score instructors based on custom metrics.
  • Ran experiments and evaluations of the system's performance on 100+ hours of teacher sessions, with final results within 5% of human evals.
Defeat COVID-19 March 2020 - May 2020 Machine Learning Lead

Co-founded a nonprofit COVID-19 risk-assessment platform with a verified-information chatbot and live dashboard.

  • In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, co-founded Defeat COVID-19, a not-for-profit organization, which leveraged technology to increase public awareness and aid in curbing the spread of the disease.
  • Led a team to build a tool to provide early stage diagnosis of the symptoms and risk assessment for Covid-19, using crowdsourced data and Deep Learning techniques.
  • The tool included a Question-Answer Chatbot based on BERT to help navigate users through the website, provide information from government verified sources and address misinformation about Covid-19.
  • It also included a real-time dashboard and interactive heatmap interface to identify at-risk localities.
Prasaurus Sports Analytics June 2019 - Sept 2019 Artificial Intelligence Consultant

Built real-time action-recognition and tracking models for elite badminton performance analysis.

  • Led a team to design a framework for real-time action recognition and perform statistical analysis, providing deep insights for player performance tracking and improvement, for an academy training national badminton players.
  • The models captured Spatio-temporal features across frames based on two-stream networks and ActionVLAD for Action Recognition, and shuttle and player tracking using a custom trained MobileNet, to provide metrics such as 'Dominant areas'.
InProspect Technologies(now Studium) March 2019 - May 2019 Machine Learning and Strategic Consultant

Designed personalized education and career-guidance recommendations for students and institutions.

Visit InProspect Technologies

  • Managed a team of engineers to design and develop a product to propel undergraduates towards career goals by providing curated career guidance. The platform provided analytics for educational institutions via the 'Enterprise Resource Planning' system.
  • Created a personalization system for recommendations to help achieve user-specified goals by aiding in coursework selection and extra-curricular activities. This ensured high success rates in the individuals' field of interest.
  • Was part of the strategic planning for incorporating product changes to drive user engagement.
Ubuntoo LLC Sept 2019 - Dec 2019 Emerging Technology Consultant

Researched AI and computer-vision solutions for waste sorting, collection, and sustainability.

Visit Ubuntoo LLC

  • A global environmental solutions platform promoting sustainable economic growth.
  • Researched and created technical reports on companies and organizations innovating in the use of Machine Learning and Computer Vision.
  • The solutions included high accuracy waste sorting systems and autonomous waste collection bots; centered around using technology to tackle environmental issues and promote sustainable development.
Occipital Tech(now AgroGrade) Feb 2019 - March 2019 Computer Vision Engineer

Improved real-time agricultural image preprocessing, cutting runtime and reducing image noise.

Visit Occipital Tech

  • A startup offering products in Agrotech to classify and grade agricultural produce using Computer Vision, resulting in reduced wastage and maximizing profits.
  • Worked on the pipeline for preprocessing of real-time image data by Background Segmentation using methods like Gaussian Mixture Models and Watershed Algorithm to tackle camera jitter and dynamic lighting conditions.
  • The effort led to an ~20% reduction in preprocessing time, along with enhancing image noise reduction by 14-15%.

Research

Can Language Model Moderators Improve the Health of Online Discourse?

H Cho, S Liu, T Shi, Darpan Jain, B Rizk, Y Huang, Z Lu, N Wen, J Gratch, E Ferrara, J May

North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) 2024

Education

University of Southern California (USC)

Master of Science in Electrical & Computer Engineering

Specialization in Machine Learning & Data Science

GPA 3.92/4.0

Coursework Highlights
  • Advanced Natural Language Processing: PhD-level coursework focused on reproducing NLP research and writing technical publications.
  • Advanced Computer Vision: PhD-level study of classical computer vision methods and deep learning approaches.
  • Information Retrieval: Search engine fundamentals, including web crawling, indexing, query processing, and retrieval evaluation.
  • Machine Learning for Medical Data: Graph neural networks and methods for learning from imbalanced medical datasets.

University of Pune, India

Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical Engineering

Labs

Anti-Anxiety Easter Egg A breathing-and-soothing micro-site to reset when things feel noisy. Stress reliefBreathing exercise
One-page Live Resume A fast, skimmable resume that behaves like a product, not a PDF. Live resume
Focus Mode A minimal focus surface to commit to one task at a time without distractions. Deep workDistraction blocker
Crowd Counting Estimates crowd density and flow in surveillance footage using CNNs. CNNTransfer learning
Stock Portfolio Manager Portfolio tracking with risk/return metrics and time-series visualizations. PythonTime series
Model Optimization Benchmarks and optimizes deep learning models with TensorRT for NVIDIA GPUs. TensorRTPyTorch
AI Ganpati Face and voice recognition blended into an interactive festival installation. MTCNNFace + voice
Vaccine Slots Notifs Pings you when COVID vaccination slots open up in your area. PythonMulti-threading
Browse all repos → The full GitHub rabbit-hole — experiments, archived ideas, and WIP work. GitHub

Recent writing

Technical Skills

Programming Languages

Programming Languages

Python, C++, Go, SQL, Java, Scala, JavaScript

Icons for Deep Learning and Machine Learning skills

Machine Learning & Generative AI

PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow, Hugging Face Transformers, LLM fine-tuning, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Agentic workflows, Model Context Protocol (MCP), Guardrails & governance, Retrieval & ranking, Recommendation systems

Machine Learning Platforms

Model Serving & MLOps

Model serving, Inference optimization (quantization, batching, TensorRT), ONNX, LLM Gateways, Model versioning & rollout, MLflow, Weights & Biases, Automated testing & CI/CD

Databases icon

Data, Evaluation & Observability

Feature engineering & dataset curation, A/B testing, LLM Evals, Model evaluation & drift monitoring, Observability & tracing, Apache Spark, Databricks, Kafka, Airflow, Vector search, Prometheus & Grafana

ML & AI Frameworks

Distributed Systems & ML Infrastructure

Distributed systems, Distributed training & parallelism (DeepSpeed), GPU/TPU computing & CUDA, Ray, Linux, Docker & Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS & GCP

Endorsements

Saurabh Bhanage

Co-Founder & CEO @ Prasaurus Sports Analytics

He is strong-willed, soft-spoken, very good at people management and soft skills.
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Darpan is one of the best people to look for when you're looking to innovate. Along with his knowledge and experience in ML/AI field, he also has an inquisitive mind which helps him to learn more and more while motivating his team at the same time. He is strong-willed, soft-spoken, very good at people management and soft skills. He helped our team to kick-start the project with a positive force and I'm sure he'd do that in whichever project he works for in the future.

Lilesh Ghadi

Director of Engineering @ Warner Bros. Discovery
Chief Technology Officer @ AdSparx Inc

He has been a great asset to our team and a pleasure to work with.
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Darpan is a meticulous professional who holds immense knowledge in the field. He has a proactive approach to tasks, focusing on attaining maximum efficiency in the work he undertakes. Darpan’s affable personality along with his domain expertise allows him to lead projects in an organized and timely manner. He has been a great asset to our team and a pleasure to work with.

Prashant Luhar

Software Engineer II @ Frontdoor Inc.

Darpan has very good hands on experience of Machine Learning and Computer Vision.
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Darpan has very good hands on experience of Machine Learning and Computer Vision. We worked together to build a Deep Learning based Video Analysis tool and I can say Darpan did a wonderful job in designing and helping to implement the project.

Reach Out.

An idea, a question, or something worth building together? Let’s talk.

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Emaildarpannjainn@gmail.com LinkedInConnect and keep in touch Twitter / X@funnyfriedderp GitHubExplore what I’m building

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