himakar

yanamandra

Senior AI Engineer

San Francisco, CA

Himakar Yanamandra, a Senior AI Engineer in San Francisco, CA, specializes in AI/ML and enterprise software, holding a Master of Science in Product Management from Carnegie Mellon University.

With a proven track record, Himakar has consistently delivered impactful results throughout his career. At Credit Saison, he built a credit scoring system, unlocking access for 100K+ businesses and driving $500M+ in loans. He also improved approval turnaround by 4x across 1.2M active loans and launched 7 lending partnerships, generating $25M in revenue.

At Micron, he reduced debug cycle time by 18% and coordinated issue resolution, protecting $60M in revenue. His portfolio includes a software project focused on open ticket solutions. Himakar's expertise in problem-solving, coupled with his technical proficiency, allows him to quickly understand complex challenges and deliver innovative solutions, adding significant value to any team.

Featured Projects

11
Open Ticket Solution for Short Routes
redBus introduced an Open Ticket option for short-distance corridors. This allowed customers to prepay a single fare and receive a QR-code ticket redeemable on any participating bus within a set time window. Flexible validity window: Board any partner bus within the time frame. Uniform, pre-negotiated fare: A flat price for the route. Live list of eligible departures: Real-time ETAs and seat counts.
View Project

View Resume

Education

Where I built the foundation of my expertise

TEPPER SCHOOL OF BUSINESS, CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

Master of Science in Product Management (Technical MBA)

Class of 2025

INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, HYDERABAD

Master of Science in Computational Linguistics and Computer Science

Class of 2022

INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, HYDERABAD

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering

Class of 2019

Experience

My professional journey and the amazing teams I've been part of

Senior Product Management Intern

HONDA RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Jul 2025 — Nov 2025

  • Product Development: Reduced manual trend research time by 30% by building a multi-agent AI system that scans information across sources and produces ranked trends with 1-page leadership briefs.
  • Strategy & Execution: Owned the end-to-end system design of AI agents, translating leadership needs into agent objectives, success metrics, and feedback loops to continuously improve trend quality and usability.

Senior Product Management Intern

YARD AI

Dec 2024 — Jun 2025

  • Product Ownership (0-1): Led end-to-end engineering for the platform (Next.js, Prisma), an AI-assisted portfolio website that turns projects into structured case studies, owning the product spec, UX decisions, and alpha launch.
  • User Experience (UX): Engineered a RAG pipeline that grounds generated case studies in each user’s uploaded project artifacts and notes, reducing average edit time by 45% in the alpha release.

Senior Product Manager

SALUBRITY HEALTH

Dec 2023 — Nov 2024

  • Product Launch (0-1): Built automated diet and nutrition workflows to scale personalized coaching, cutting plan turnaround time by 50%. Launched MVP with user goals intake and follow-up nudges, and optimized results through A/B testing.
  • Cross-Functional Execution: Improved retention by 20% by analyzing meal logging funnel dropouts and partnering with engineering, data, and design to ship photo-based calorie capture that replaced manual entry.

Engineering Manager, Machine Learning

CREDIT SAISON

Nov 2022 — Nov 2023

  • Product Leadership: Built a new credit scoring system to underwrite underserved small businesses using alternative proxy data, unlocking first-time credit access for 100K+ business and driving $500M+ in loans disbursals in the first year.
  • Innovation: Shipped real-time credit risk and fraud scoring across lending channels by launching a multi-modal loan decisioning service, improving approval turnaround by 4x at scale (1.2M active loans, $1.2B Assets Under Management).
  • Partnerships: Launched 7 consumer lending partnerships (Amazon, Booking.com, SoftBank), aligning product, engineering, business, and client teams to take integrations live, meet annual OKRs and generate $25M in revenue.

Product Engineer-II, Machine Learning

MICRON

Jun 2021 — Oct 2022

  • Data Analytics: Built ML models to detect anomalies and cluster failure signatures on high-volume test data, reducing debug cycle time by 18% while coordinating design, process, quality, and manufacturing teams to close issues before release.
  • Stakeholder Management: Owned escalation triage and KPIs for key enterprise customers (Lockheed Martin, Mercedes-Benz) during the global chip shortage, coordinating engineering and manufacturing to resolve 2,000+ issues and protect $60M in revenue.

Research Engineer, Machine Learning

LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS RESEARCH CENTRE, IIIT-H

Dec 2016 — May 2021

  • Research Leadership: Published 3 peer-reviewed papers by leading a 40+ member cross-functional program that built 25 medical datasets for healthcare NLP and expanded Telugu Wikipedia language coverage.

All Projects

11](/content/portfolio/himakaryv/open-ticket-solution-for-short-routes/index.html)

Open Ticket Solution for Short Routes

redBus introduced an Open Ticket option for short-distance corridors. This allowed customers to prepay a single fare and receive a QR-code ticket redeemable on any participating bus within a set time window. Flexible validity window: Board any partner bus within the time frame. Uniform, pre-negotiated fare: A flat price for the route. Live list of eligible departures: Real-time ETAs and seat counts.