Vikas Kumar

Vikas Kumar AI/ML Engineer · MS Business Analytics, Wake Forest '26 · Bay Area I build production AI systems from an empty repo. Right now I'm the founding full-stack engineer at The M.A.P. — React frontend, Python backend, data pipelines, model serving, deployment. The core is a ticket-demand system combining CatBoost with LLM reasoning over artist tiers, venue history, and local competition across 15,814 events and 97 venues. Most of the real work happens outside the model: sitting with venue operators, watching where predictions break, and rewriting the parts I thought were finished. Before this: founding engineer on a legal research platform at Lawroom AI that went from zero to 6,000+ users, and a logistics optimization system at Aditya Birla Group credited with $3.2M in annual savings. At Wake Forest I shipped a RAG system over institutional career data used by 500+ students and 40+ advisors — and built the eval harness before scaling it, so chunking and prompt changes could be measured instead of guessed at. I treat prompt engineering as systems design. Context window architecture, output grounding, retrieval under pressure, and hallucination mitigation are engineering constraints with e

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