I build large-scale ML and platform systems with a product mindset. My work spans real-time authorization, model serving, latency-sensitive services, and security infrastructure. I care about clarity, reliability, and UX that makes sophisticated systems feel simple. I enjoy the craft of engineering, especially when strong systems thinking meets good design.
Born and raised in Mumbai, India. Fitness enthusiast. Big-time foodie. Builder at heart ❤
Strong opinions, loosely held. Shipped in production. Spaces over tabs.
I started at Microsoft in 2014, earned my master’s at NYU, then worked at Yahoo, Amazon, Twitter, and now Uber. The common thread has been building production systems where scale, reliability, and good judgment matter.
Feb. 2023 - Present
Led multi-year access control transformation from static policies to adaptive ML-driven authorization, spanning risk visibility, AI-assisted human-in-the-loop decisions, and ML-based enforcement for agentic workflows.
Jul. 2021 - Jan. 2023
Delivered a fully managed, config-driven ML serving platform that enabled teams across Twitter to serve ML models at scale with 20 ms p99 latency. Built model observability and drift monitoring that surfaced regressions earlier and reduced average retraining frequency while preserving model quality.
Jun. 2018 - Jul. 2021
As a dev on the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) team at Alexa, owned a tier-1 web service platform which delivers the fastest, most reliable, and affordable service for audio processing and speech to text conversion. Decoupled Alexa’s audio streaming path from core ASR architecture and moved processing closer to customers, reducing p99 user-perceived latency by 25% in emerging markets.
May 2017 - Aug. 2017
As a part of the Advertising & Search Products team, reduced forecasting time from over 7 hours to less than 2 hours and improved search performance with in-memory indexing.
Jul. 2014 - Jul. 2016
Selected for Microsoft Academy for College Hires (MACH), a 2-year new grad development program. Built an office-space web app visualizing real-time occupancy, noise, and temperature data using custom 3D-printed sensors. Added RFID-based room reservation and helped drive a 3x increase in monthly usage.
Jun. 2013 - Aug. 2013
Implemented a utility for pre performance testing environment setup of Microsoft's Volume Licensing Reporting portal. Also contributed to building a stable and efficient automation framework and automated regression test cases which drastically reduced manual testing effort for every consequent release cycle.
Sep. 2016 - May 2018
Major: Computer Science
GPA: 3.7/4.0
Aug. 2010 - Jun. 2014
Major: Information Technology
GPA: 3.6/4.0
First and foremost, Apurva is a delight to work with. He is passionate and eager to help out broadly in the team, bringing a bright smile and enthusiasm to every call and conversation. In our (unfortunately) short tenure together at Twitter, I've seen Apurva shine as a mentor, set up monitoring/alerting for core services, work with Product to prototype and test hypotheses, and help mature the team's processes to be more efficient and effective.
Sean Paradiso
Manager (Machine Learning), Twitter
Apurva was part of the ML Serving team that focuses on ML inference workloads. Apurva has been a key team member that brought a lot of team cohesion and energy through scheduling social meetings etc. This has been important to that team as the team was distributed across multiple locations.
Briac Marcatté
Senior Manager (ML Eng), Twitter
Coming straight from college, he was able to quickly ramp up in the domain and the technology being used with minimal guidance. The innovative ideas Apurva implemented proved to be very beneficial and helped the team meet business expectations of delivering in a short duration of time and with zero defects. Along with focusing on his assigned project work, he proactively volunteered for stretch assignments. Overall, Apurva has consistently performed his duties with competence and gone the extra mile to ensure a solid product was shipped. He gelled very well with the team and was respected by his team members for his passion and innovative ideas.
Rajesh Chadha
Sr. Software Engineering Lead, Microsoft
Apurva showed tremendous enthusiasm for technology and played a crucial role in some of the automation delivery for my team. He is a self starter and very committed team player. I have never known a situation when either I or team leads had to follow up with him. He would go the extra mile to scale up on new technology and coding skills. Even though he was still a student while doing internship, at workplace he displayed high levels of maturity and great sense of responsibility. I was happy he was in my team.
Ronnie Joseph
Senior Manager, Microsoft
Whether it is ML systems, security infrastructure, or platform tools, I’m always happy to compare notes.