Ashutosh Tiwari Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Adobe Firefly

I am a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Adobe Firefly, with a Master's in Computational Data Science from Indiana University Bloomington, and over 8 years of experience designing, building, and deploying scalable machine learning systems. My current work spans distributed inference and training frameworks, MLOps platforms on Kubernetes, and foundation-model training for generative AI on billions of images and videos. Prior to Firefly, I worked on data and ML platforms at Swiggy and Flipkart. I am also a first-author published researcher in Fairness-Aware Graph Neural Networks (NetSci 2023, IC2S2 2023).

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I'm always open to discussing new projects, creative ideas, or opportunities to be part of your vision.

  • Aug 2021 - May 2023
    Indiana University Bloomington

    MS (Computational Data Science)

  • Aug 2011 – May 2015
    National Institute of Technology, Patna

    B-Tech (Computer Science & Engineering)

Education
Publications
  • Summer 2022 - Summer 2023
    Indiana University Network Science Institute

    Worked on novel model training methods to produce "Fairness Aware Graph Recommendation" models with Prof. YY Ahn and Prof. S Kojaku.

  • Summer 2022 - Fall 2022
    Kelly School of Business

    Paid RA on "User Intent as a Network" with Prof. YY Ahn, P Kantak, and FB Yara. Collaboration with Luddy, funded by Kelly School of Business.

  • Fall 2021
    NLP LAB @ IUB

    Contributed extensively to design of TieML and Events' Timeline modelling using fine-tuned Large Language Models.

Research Experience
  • Jul 2024 – Present
    Adobe Firefly

    Senior Machine Learning Engineer (ML Platform & Frameworks)

    • Lead fault-tolerant distributed inference and training infrastructure for the org's ML platform — GPU pipelines on Kubernetes engineered to survive node loss and partial failure, from hyperscaled daily ingestion through production model inference.
    • Designed and led the org's online and offline inference systems: online inference on vLLM + Ray for rapid experimentation with LLMs such as Falcon-40B and Llama 2 70B; offline inference on Ray Data + PyTorch Lightning, introducing torch.compile(mode="max-autotune") in production as a compiler bridge — compiler-generated Triton kernels, operator fusion, and CUDA-graph capture.
    • Modeled data pipelines as horizontally-scaling Source → Transform → Sink plugins with no pod-to-pod communication, KEDA-autoscaled on SQS queue depth.
    • Leading development of a PyTorch foundation-model training framework adopted across the org for training generative models on billions of images and videos — a plugin-based strategy pattern over FSDP/FSDP2, Flash Attention 2/3, and context/distributed attention for DiT text-to-image and text-to-video training.
    • Built the CLI-driven build and deployment system (BuildKit images on KEDA-scaled Kubernetes jobs, pushed to ECR), fronted by a Rust control plane and an MCP interface so AI agents can drive builds, deployments, and inference.
    • Solely authored the org's fault-tolerant training-data governance and lineage subsystem in Rust: idempotent claim/receipt registration, immutable S3 evidence layouts, and manifest-after-data publication.
    • Wrote the org's first data quality framework on Cerberus, used across enrichment pipelines to validate the correctness of feature-generation outputs.
  • Jan 2019 – Jul 2021
    Swiggy

    Software Dev Engineer II (ML Platform)

    Bengaluru, India

    • Was part of team that worked on Feature Store and pipeline which feeds on-demand features to deployed ML models at production scale(4Bn rows, 10K QPS). Pipeline-supported multichannel ingestion, i.e. Spark, Flink and user files etc.
    • Founding member of Forecasting and Correlation Platform which was considered by many teams to forecast concerned time series. These forecasts power critical scaling decisions across organizations in real time.
    • Led DAQ, a tool used to scrape APIs at scale. Used to collect data for analysis/ model training at a scale of 15 M rows daily.
  • Sep 2017 – Jan 2019
    Flipkart

    Software Development Engineer (Search Relevance)

    Bengaluru, India

    • Was responsible for improvements/inception of search intent models(CRF/Neural Network based), identifying error classes, coming up with solutions, and fixing them. These models power user search and discovery for millions every day.
    • Implemented a FastText based query store classifier, which predicts the category of a tail query.
    • Implemented the first workflow to automate training and auto-deployment of various search models in Flipkart. First was written using Luigi and later migrated to Airflow.
    • Wrote a generic framework using Airflow which at runtime creates generic dags for different ML models and orchestrates their training to deployment flow, including data and model validations.
    • Implemented large scale (4Bn+ datapoints) pipelines using Cascading/HDFS to extract data from user events and then transform it to be used for training these models.
  • Sep 2016 – Sep 2017
    Groupon

    Software Development Engineer

    Bengaluru, India

    • Worked on a component called Cyclops, an interface between Customer representatives and internal services.
    • This service is live in all countries in which Groupon operates.
  • Sep 2015 – Aug 2016
    Netspeed Systems

    Software Engineer

    Bengaluru, India

    • Led engineering efforts on modules like Polarity based Arbitration, Multi-Cast Filtering, Structural Latency Breakdown, etc.
Work Experience
Teaching Experience

rollout

Rust, Distributed Training & Inference, RL for LLMs, vLLM, PyO3, Postgres
Multi-node reinforcement-learning framework for LLMs in Rust (18 crates, 197 test files, CI): PPO/GRPO/DPO/SFT/RM algorithms, vLLM-backed batch and online inference, actor/learner split with work-stealing, training-state and CRIU process snapshots, PyO3 in-process plugins.


graph_ml

Python, PyTorch Geometric, C++/Cython
sklearn-style Graph-ML library on PyTorch/PyTorch Geometric with optimized C++/Cython random-walk kernels; CI-tested.



Projects