Himakar YanamandraSenior Product Manager
AI/ML & FinTech · 6+ Years
San Francisco, CA · CMU MSPM '25

Ship AIthat actuallyworks.

Senior PM with 6+ years shipping AI/ML products across FinTech and B2B SaaS — LLMs, RAG pipelines, real-time credit decisioning, and large-scale data infrastructure at production scale.

LLMs & RAGFinTech0→1B2B SaaSML Infra
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Selected Work

2022 – 2026 · Tap to expand
On building AI products
Getting credit to 100,000 businesses wasn't a model problem — it was a product problem.
Credit Saison · Alternative Scoring, 2023

About

The short version

Six years building AI products at the intersection of machine learning and real business impact — from credit access to conversational AI.

I started as an ML engineer and researcher, which means I read the model card before the press release. That background lets me work with data science teams on their terms — understanding the tradeoffs, writing specs that engineering can actually ship, and knowing when the model is the bottleneck vs. the product is.

I hold a Master's in Product Management from Carnegie Mellon and an MS in Computational Linguistics and Computer Science from IIIT Hyderabad, plus 3 peer-reviewed NLP publications. I bring the same rigor to a PRD that I bring to a research paper: clear problem statement, precise methodology, measurable outcome.

Toolkit
Product Strategy0→1 DevelopmentLLMs & RAGPrompt EngineeringModel EvaluationA/B TestingRoadmap OwnershipPRDsGo-to-MarketAWS · GCP · AzurePython & SQLFigma & JiraReal-time ML ServingAnomaly DetectionNLP/NLU

Experience

2018 – Present
Jun 2026 – Present
Product Manager
Sensitel
San Francisco, CA
Jan 2026 – May 2026
Founding Product Manager
Projects Yard AI
San Francisco
Aug 2025 – Dec 2025
Senior Product Manager
Honda Research Institute
San Francisco
Jan 2024 – Dec 2024
Senior Product Manager
Aswartha Technical Services — B2B SaaS & ML Infrastructure
Remote
Dec 2022 – Dec 2023
Senior Machine Learning Engineer
Credit Saison — FinTech credit decisioning at scale
Remote
Jul 2021 – Nov 2022
Software Development Engineer-II
Micron — Semiconductor ML & anomaly detection
Remote
Jan 2018 – Jun 2021
Machine Learning Engineer
LTRC, IIIT-Hyderabad — NLP, medical text, multilingual models
Hyderabad

Research Publications

3 peer-reviewed papers
RANLP

Towards Sentiment Analysis of Tobacco Products' Usage in Social Media

2021
ECIR

Smokpro: Towards Tobacco Product Identification in Social Media Text

2020
EMNLP

Smokeng: Towards Fine-Grained Classification of Tobacco-Related Social Media Text

2019