AI Engineer at Nextiva · Scottsdale, AZ

Photo of Varshini Rao

I'm an AI engineer with 3+ years of experience taking machine learning and generative AI from idea to production: LLM agents, RAG, predictive models, computer vision, and the data pipelines, APIs and cloud infrastructure behind them. I pair a master's in Robotics & AI from ASU with enterprise engineering experience, and I measure my work by impact: $72M in revenue protected, 7,900+ hours automated every month, and tools used by 2,000+ people.

Inference graphLive · hover to fire neurons
In: the data my systems readOut: what they return
$72Mannual revenue protected
$1.2M+yearly license spend cut
7,900+hours automated per month
1,000+employees trained in AI
Nextiva · 2025 to now

What I've built at Nextiva

Every system here is running in production, owned by a real team and measured by the number it moves.

Customer TwinningRetention

Churn prediction that flags at-risk accounts 210 days before they cancel

Combines call transcripts with account data. I productionized the XGBoost model that now feeds the retention team's outreach queue.

  • XGBoost
  • Feature engineering
  • 92% recall
  • 0.86 AUC
Flagged210 days of lead timeCancellation date
$6M / morecurring revenue protected, $72M annualized
RELAYCompany-wide

One central AI workspace for 2,000+ employees

Replaced per-seat Claude and ChatGPT licenses with one platform: token-based usage tracking, privacy guardrails, MCP integrations into internal apps, and Agent Skills packs for each department.

  • MCP
  • Guardrails
  • Usage metering
  • Agent Skills
$1.2M+ / yrin license costs eliminated
Onboarding RAGService Delivery

Chat assistant inside the customer-facing Onboarding app

I owned the retrieval pipeline, the evaluation harness and CI/CD for users worldwide.

−98%manual lookups, 39 hrs/week saved
VERAProcurement

LLM agent that processes procurement contracts

Handles contract processing that the procurement team used to do by hand.

100+contracts processed per month
CARLQuality

LLM agent that scores customer calls for QA

Scores calls at a volume a human QA team could never sample by hand.

3,200calls scored per week
ROSIESales

LLM agent for RFP responses

Speeds up how the sales team answers incoming requests for proposal.

21d → 3hRFP turnaround
MONICAStrategy

Agentic n8n pipeline for competitive research

Continuously tracks 10 competitors and replaces manual research.

40 hrsanalyst time saved per week
AI Day SchoolEnablement

Biweekly AI training for non-technical teams

The program behind company-wide adoption of RELAY and everyday AI tools.

1,000+employees across 22 departments

VERA, CARL and ROSIE together automate 7,900+ hours of manual work a month.Python · FastAPI · React · GCP

Career

Experience & education

Computer science in India, enterprise engineering at Infosys, a master's in robotics and AI at Arizona State, then AI engineering at Nextiva. Newest first.

  1. Current roleJun 2025 – presentScottsdale, AZ

    AI Engineer · Nextiva

    • Built and shipped the eight systems above: churn prediction, the RELAY workspace, a RAG assistant, four production agents and AI Day School.
    • Develop and deploy full-stack applications on GCP with Python FastAPI backends and React frontends.
    • Lead design and code reviews, triage production issues, and maintain documentation through CI/CD deployment and monitoring.
  2. EducationGraduated May 2025Tempe, AZ

    M.S. Robotics & Autonomous Systems (AI) · Arizona State University

    GPA 3.83 / 4.00

    • Coursework in Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Data Processing, Robotic Systems and Data Mining.
  3. ExperienceAug 2021 – Jul 2023Bangalore, India

    Senior Systems Engineer · Infosys

    • Improved service latency by 94% by migrating 240 legacy .NET services to .NET 6 microservices on Docker and Kubernetes.
    • Received the Ace Star Award for delivery excellence.
    • Trained and onboarded 6 junior engineers.
  4. EducationGraduated Aug 2020India

    B.S. Computer Science · Visvesvaraya Technological University

    CGPA 8.49 / 10.00

    • Coursework in Data Structures and Algorithms, Cloud Computing and Operating Systems.
    • Final-year project on plant leaf disease detection, presented at an IEEE conference.
Selected work

Projects

Computer vision, deep learning, generative models, big-data analysis, constraint solving and robotics, built outside my day job. Code for most of these is on GitHub.

personal / asl-sign-to-text

Real-time American Sign Language Detector

Personal · 2025

Translates signs to text in real time so people with hearing or speech impairments can communicate more easily. A multi-modal pipeline in Python and C++ built on MediaPipe hand landmarks and OpenCV, running on an ordinary laptop CPU.

  • Python
  • C++
  • MediaPipe
  • OpenCV
96%accuracy, 50+ signs
25–35frames per second
<40 msper prediction
my-projects / Doodle_Recognition_Kaggle_Challenge

Doodle Recognition

ASU · M.S. Machine Learning

A web app that recognizes hand-drawn doodles, built for a Kaggle-style challenge in my master's ML course. A Keras CNN trained on Google's Quick, Draw! dataset classifies sketches as star, sun, moon, rainbow or cloud. Draw live on a canvas or upload an image, and a Flask server returns the prediction.

  • Keras
  • CNN
  • Flask
  • JavaScript
  • jQuery
5doodle classes
2input modes: draw or upload
my-projects / Plant_Leaf_Disease_Detection_System

Plant Leaf Disease Detection

Undergraduate final-year project
Presented at an IEEE conference

Detects disease in plant leaves from photos and recommends a pesticide. An OpenCV pipeline cleans each image (resizing, grayscale, noise removal, edge detection, thresholding, contours and segmentation) to isolate infected regions, then a TensorFlow/Keras CNN trained on the PlantVillage dataset classifies the leaf. Wrapped in a Tkinter desktop app.

  • CNN
  • TensorFlow/Keras
  • OpenCV
  • PlantVillage
  • Tkinter
my-projects / Yolo_Object_Detection

Lavender Balloon Detection

Computer vision

Real-time detection of lavender balloons in a live webcam feed. A custom-trained YOLOv8 model finds candidates, and HSV colour masking confirms them, which keeps false positives down under changing light.

  • YOLOv8
  • Ultralytics
  • OpenCV
  • HSV segmentation
  • Python
640 pxtraining resolution
50epochs, custom dataset
asu / us-accident-severity

US Accident Analysis for Road Safety

ASU · Spring 2025

Classified accident severity and located high-risk zones across 6M+ US accident records using Random Forest and K-Means clustering. Weather, visibility and time of day came out as the strongest drivers of severity.

  • Random Forest
  • K-Means
  • scikit-learn
88%severity accuracy
0.86weighted F1
8high-risk clusters, 49 states
my-projects / Analysis_of_Arizona_Businesses

Gym Review Analysis on Yelp Data

Arizona businesses · Big data

Processed and analysed customer reviews of gym businesses from the Yelp dataset on a Hadoop and PySpark stack, surfacing trends gym operators can act on and visualizing the results.

  • PySpark
  • Hadoop
  • Python
  • Visualization
10,000+reviews analysed
my-projects / AI_Image_Generator

AI-Powered Image Generator

Personal · 2024

A Stable Diffusion web app that creates marketing visuals from text prompts, deployed on Hugging Face Spaces with CI/CD and inference tuned for production use.

  • Stable Diffusion
  • Python
  • FP16
  • Hugging Face Spaces
12s → 4sper image
200+visuals produced
my-projects / House_Reconfiguration_Problem

House Reconfiguration Solver

Answer Set Programming

Reorganizes rooms, cabinets and items at the lowest cost while respecting ownership, compatibility and capacity rules (5 items per cabinet, 4 cabinets per room, long items only in high cabinets). Modelled in ASP and solved with Clingo, following the ASP Challenge 2019 problem.

  • ASP
  • Clingo
  • Constraint optimization
1unit cost, small case
10items placed, medium case

More projects

Tic-Tac-Toe Robotics

Robotics project built around the game of tic-tac-toe.

UR5 Universal Robots

Project on the UR5 collaborative robot arm.

Movie Ticket Booking System

Book seats by tier (Normal, Silver, Prime), pay online and get a digital ticket. Admins manage movies, showtimes, seats, sales and feedback over a six-table relational schema.

PHP · MySQL · BootstrapView code ↗

Blood Bank Management System

Connects donors, patients and blood banks: donor registration, live blood stock tracking, request and fulfilment, and an admin dashboard, built to shorten emergency response times.

PHP · MySQL · BootstrapView code ↗

Inventory Management System

Tracks stock levels and inventory records.

Library Management System

Tracks books, members and loans.

C++
Recognition

Credentials

M.S. 3.83

Robotics and Autonomous Systems (Artificial Intelligence)

Arizona State University · 2025
AZ-900

Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals

Microsoft
DP-900

Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Fundamentals

Microsoft
IEEE

Conference presentation of plant leaf disease detection research

IEEE conference
Ace Star

Award for delivery excellence

Infosys
B.S. 8.49

Computer Science

Visvesvaraya Technological University · 2020
Toolkit

Skills, clustered

My toolkit plotted like an embedding space: related tools sit near each other. Hover a cluster to focus it.

Skill map
Open to AI engineering roles

Hiring an AI engineer? Let's talk.

Emailvarshinirao3520@gmail.com
Phone+1 602-565-4823
LinkedIn ↗in/varshinirao GitHub ↗varshinirao3520