YC

AI Product Leadership · Enterprise ML Infrastructure

Yukta
Chikate

AI Product Leader & Senior AI/ML Engineer — 5+ years bridging complex machine learning infrastructure, model evaluation, and business strategy across enterprise healthcare and financial platforms.

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Yukta Chikate

Location

San Francisco, CA

Email

yuktachikate14@gmail.com

Elsewhere

LinkedIn ↗ GitHub ↗ Medium ↗ YouTube ↗ Google Scholar ↗
Enterprise RAG Agentic Evaluation Safety-Critical AI ML Infrastructure 0-to-1 Product Strategy
Introduction

Engineering trust into intelligent systems.

I work at the intersection of machine learning infrastructure and product strategy — building the evaluation layers, observability pipelines, and agentic architectures that let enterprise AI systems operate reliably in healthcare and finance, where failure has real consequences.

Over the past five years I've led cross-functional teams from 0-to-1 prototypes through production hardening — reducing hallucination risk, cutting inference latency, and shipping the safety rails that let organizations trust what their models say.

Selected Work

Project Case Studies

01

AeroCoMe

Aviation Safety Decision System

Edge Inference Safety-Critical AI Perception & Planning

Problem

Uncertainty-aware AI system needed for real-time edge decision-making in flight-safety contexts, where latency and confidence calibration are inseparable from safety.

Architecture

Integrated perception and planning modules with bounded probabilistic safety states, preventing edge drift and keeping decisions within verified confidence envelopes.

02

Prompt Tree Explorer

GenAI Debugging & Tracing Tool

35%

Faster root-cause analysis

Problem

Non-deterministic LLM tool routing created debugging bottlenecks across multi-agent environments, making failures nearly impossible to trace back to root cause.

Solution & Impact

Built an interactive tracing and visualization tool letting engineers inspect reasoning chains, tool latency, and failure points — slashing debugging cycles by 35%.

03

VBC-ARE

Enterprise Agent Evaluation Layer

~92%

Hallucinations caught pre-prod

~40%

Less manual claims review

Problem

Unreliable outputs and hallucination risk in high-stakes healthcare claims operations threatened both accuracy and regulatory trust.

Solution

Designed grounding and retrieval quality scoring pipelines evaluating BigQuery semantic lookups against historical claim graphs before responses reached production.

Career

The Journey So Far

Six roles, one throughline — turning fragile ML prototypes into systems enterprises can actually trust.

July 8, 2026 — Present

Program Manager

Insight Global

Lead program reporting, analytics, and process improvement initiatives — building Power BI dashboards, defining KPIs, automating recurring reports, and translating operational data into clear insights for leadership decision-making.

Power BI dashboards KPI definition Automated reporting

Feb 2026 — July 2026

Assistant Engineering Manager & Agentic AI Lead

CVS Aetna — EXL

Led a 12-person cross-functional team across UX, data engineering, and frontend to ship enterprise AI and source-traceability interfaces, directing BigQuery semantic search and automated contract validation at scale.

12-person team led BigQuery semantic search

June 2025 — Oct 2025

Software Engineer, System Health & Reliability

SnapLogic

Designed automated agentic test-case execution and deployed Prometheus/OpenTelemetry observability across the release pipeline, cutting QA effort and recurring production failures in the same quarter.

-60% QA effort -25% production failures

Mar 2025 — June 2025

Software Engineer, ML Infrastructure

NiovLabs

Built core 0-to-1 prototype demos that directly contributed to securing Y Combinator funding, then led the offline evaluation and A/B testing program that followed.

YC funding secured +22% engagement

Oct 2022 — Mar 2025

Data Scientist, System Evaluation

Designing Systems LLC

Took multi-modal AI systems from POC to production behind automated validation gates, then applied TensorRT quantization and ONNX runtime optimization to make inference fast enough — and cheap enough — to run at scale.

-25% deployment errors -35% inference latency -20% infra cost

Feb 2021 — Aug 2022

Data Analyst & ML Engineer

Barclays Investment Bank

Built anomaly detection pipelines watching 10M+ daily financial transactions — where I first learned that a model's confidence is only as good as its evaluation harness.

+26% detection precision 10M+ daily transactions

Education

M.S. in Computer Systems

Northeastern University

Dean's Graduate Research Assistant

Education

B.S. in Computer Science

Yeshwantrao Chavan College of Engineering

Published research with ISRO & NEERI — see Recognition below

Recognition

Publications, Awards & Speaking

Selected evidence of contributions to the field, sourced from published research and public record.

Publications Google Scholar ↗

IJERT · ICACT 2021 · Vol. 9, Issue 8

Analyze Fluctuations in the Water Level of Erai River Using Sentinel Data

Chikate, Y., Konge, A., Damahe, L. (2021)

DOI: 10.17577/IJERTCONV9IS08014 ↗

Northeastern University

HealthBot: Your AI-Powered Virtual Healthcare Companion

Chikate, Y., Brown, N. (2024)

Yeshwantrao Chavan College of Engineering (YCCE)

Comparison of G-Shaped Slot Antenna on Various Substrates for 5G, Wi-Max and Other Applications

Chinchole, A., Chikate, Y. (2020)

Awards & Honors

2022 – 2024

Dean's Research Assistant

College of Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston

Research focus: Parkinson's disease analysis, healthcare

2022 – 2024

Parkinson's Disease Analysis Research

Healthcare Department, Northeastern University

Placeholder cards — send award name, issuing organization, and year to fill these in.

Speaking & Panels

2019 – 2022

Toastmasters International

Member — recurring public speaking and leadership practice

[Add year]

Covid Difficulties

[Add event / conference name]

Placeholder cards — send event name, talk title, and year to fill these in.

Licenses & Certifications

Federal Aviation Administration

FAA Student Pilot License

Federal Aviation Administration · Issued Aug 2024

Federal Communications Commission

General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) License — Part 95

Federal Communications Commission · Issued Jul 2025 · Expires Aug 2035

Credential ID: FCC call sign — WSJE727

Show credential ↗
NVIDIA

AI Infrastructure and Operations Fundamentals

NVIDIA · Issued Dec 2024

Show credential ↗
NVIDIA

Medical Imaging AI with MONAI Bootcamp

NVIDIA · Issued Nov 2024

Barclays

Data and Record Management

Barclays Investment Bank

Capabilities

Skills Matrix

AI & GenAI

  • Enterprise RAG
  • Agentic Evaluation
  • Vector Search
  • TensorRT / ONNX
  • Computer Vision

Data & Infra

  • Python · SQL · BigQuery
  • Prometheus · OpenTelemetry
  • Docker · Kubernetes
  • AWS · GCP

Strategy

  • 0-to-1 Product Roadmapping
  • Cross-Functional Leadership
  • Agile / Scrum
  • AI Governance
Recommendations

What Colleagues Say

LinkedIn ↗

Mentored Yukta · March 2024

Nik Bear Brown

Associate Teaching Professor, Northeastern University

Praised for exceptional technical aptitude and real-world problem-solving across three university courses.

LinkedIn ↗

Managed Yukta directly · August 2022

Ravinderpal Singh Mission

Vice President, Barclays Technology Center India

Instrumental on the team — quickly mastered the FinCrime domain and took on complex challenges without hesitation.

LinkedIn ↗

Mentored Yukta · November 2021

John Marshall

Technology Manager, William O'Neil India

A hard-working, fast-adapting engineer who ramped quickly on React.js, Redux, and other new technologies as a fresher.

LinkedIn ↗

Worked with Yukta on the same team · December 2020

Asheesh Sharma

Principal Scientist, CSIR-NEERI

Delivered detailed GLDAS computation and ArcGIS analysis during a 6-month research internship at NEERI.

LinkedIn ↗
Newsletter

Field Notes on Applied AI

Occasional deep-dives on shipping ML into production — evaluation pipelines, agentic debugging, and what actually breaks when you put an LLM in front of high-stakes decisions. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.

Let's build something reliable

Open to conversations on
AI leadership & systems.

yuktachikate14@gmail.com
LinkedIn ↗ GitHub ↗ Medium ↗ YouTube ↗ Google Scholar ↗ San Francisco, CA