Hi, I'm

Sanjay Nadhavajhala

Head of AI · Founding Engineer at F2. Building agent infrastructure and document intelligence for finance.

Agent infrastructure for finance · Agentic document platform · Search across 300+ file data rooms · 3 U.S. patents · 1M+ open-source model downloads

Get in touch

About

I've spent the last decade building AI systems that ship — from production speech models at IBM Watson, to the open-source AIOps platform Opni at SUSE, to tool-calling language models downloaded over a million times, to agent infrastructure and document intelligence for financial workflows at F2.

I'm a full-stack AI builder. I design cloud infrastructure, architect agent runtimes, train and fine-tune models, and ship products end-to-end. I was the first AI hire at Rancher Labs before its acquisition by SUSE, and today I'm Head of AI and a founding engineer at F2, building a shared document platform where users and agents can work together across complex financial data rooms.

I've also served on the expert review panel for the Bezos Earth Fund's $100M AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge and hold three U.S. patents spanning AI security, IoT privacy, and 3D avatar generation.

I like to understand the full stack — from infrastructure to product.

Experience

Sep 2025 – Present

Head of AI · Founding Engineer · F2

Agent infrastructure · Shared document workspace · Financial search

Head of AI and a founding engineer at F2, building agentic AI for private equity and commercial banking workflows. Designed and built core product systems: cloud infrastructure on AWS and GCP, an agent runtime with plan mode and durable workflows, and MCP servers for Excel and PowerPoint. Architected an agentic document platform: a real-time shared filesystem and synchronization layer where users and agents can work together across financial materials, similar to a collaborative drive built for AI workflows. Built document understanding and hybrid search across data rooms with 300+ files, including financial PDFs, Excel workbooks, tables, figures, and supporting documents, combining institutional knowledge with live market data.

f2.ai

Mar 2025 – Sep 2025

Head of AI · Arc

Spun out F2 as independent company

Led AI strategy and development at Arc before spinning out F2 as an independent company. Defined the product vision and technical direction for AI-powered financial tools that became the foundation of F2.

joinarc.com

Jul 2023 – Mar 2025

Lead AI Engineer · Acorn Labs (now Obot AI)

Rubra: 1M+ downloads · block-expansion post-training

Led AI engineering for Acorn Labs, driving development across the Obot agentic platform and the Rubra suite of open-source language models fine-tuned for tool calling. The models surpassed 100K downloads in the first week and have been downloaded over 1 million times to date. Developed a block-expansion post-training approach: adding transformer blocks and training expanded parameters to teach tool-calling behavior while preserving base-model capabilities. Defined model strategy, built fine-tuning and evaluation infrastructure, and shipped production AI capabilities across the platform.

huggingface.co

Feb 2021 – Jul 2023

Engineering Manager · SUSE

Opni open-source AIOps platform · SUSECON keynote

Promoted to Engineering Manager following SUSE's acquisition of Rancher Labs. Created and led three product lines: Opni, Rancher Prime AI Assistant, and Rancher Observability. Built Opni, an open-source AIOps platform for Kubernetes with log anomaly detection, automated alerting, and multi-cluster insights. Shipped Rancher Prime AI Assistant with generative capabilities. Owned end-to-end delivery across all three products — software architecture, AI model design, product management, and hiring. Managed a globally distributed team of 10 Kubernetes and AI engineers. Keynote speaker at SUSECON 2023 in Munich, presenting Rancher Prime AI and AI Insights.

opni.io

Nov 2020 – Feb 2021

Staff Software Engineer · Rancher Labs → SUSE

AI/ML platform foundations following SUSE acquisition

Joined Rancher Labs as its first AI hire to build the company's AI and machine learning capabilities from the ground up. Following Rancher's acquisition by SUSE, designed the foundational architecture for what became Opni and the Rancher AI Assistant.

Sep 2018 – Oct 2020

ML Engineer, Watson AI · IBM

Multi-GPU speech training, AIOps, 3 patents

Speech to Text — Introduced multi-GPU training to the speech pipeline. Developed a memory-mapped data loader yielding 38% faster model training. Designed a balanced-load multi-GPU training strategy that improved training speed by 61% and reduced Word Error Rate by 1%. Built and shipped production broadband and narrowband STT models for Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. AIOps — Designed the log anomaly detection model architecture and led a team that built a full simulation environment — cloud-native applications on Kubernetes/OpenShift with LogDNA, Humio, Sysdig, Prometheus, PagerDuty, and ServiceNow — to replicate production client environments and validate models through fault injection. Customer Care Analytics — Developed evaluation metrics (Metric Error Rate, Sentiment Error Rate) for assessing composite ML systems with a speech-to-text component.

May 2017 – Aug 2017

ML Engineer, Extreme Blue · IBM

Veracity project for Watson Discovery

Selected for IBM's Extreme Blue program — a highly selective technical leadership internship where small teams build and present product prototypes to IBM executives. Led development of the Veracity project, a machine learning system for identifying questionable and unreliable content within IBM Watson Discovery. Presented the project at Expo Day to senior IBM leadership.

Jan 2017 – May 2017

Data Scientist · Disney

Box office projections, Super Bowl ad placement

Graduate intern on the Management Science team. Built theatre-level box office projection models using multi-layer perceptrons and developed the data layer on Apache Spark to process and analyze millions of data points across Disney's content portfolio. Work directly influenced Disney's marketing decisions, including determining Super Bowl ad slot placements for Disney and Pixar films during the 2017 Super Bowl.

Jun 2015 – Sep 2015

Software Engineer · Amazon

Built a one-click checkout experience for Amazon B2B

Intern on the Amazon B2B team. Developed a one-click checkout experience that shipped to Amazon B2B.

Selected work

F2

Agent infrastructure for finance

An agentic document platform for private equity and commercial banking workflows. I built agent infrastructure, a collaborative document workspace for users and agents, and search across financial PDFs, Excel workbooks, and supporting documents in data rooms with 300+ files.

f2.ai

Rubra

1M+ downloads

Acorn Labs (now Obot AI)

An open-source collection of language models fine-tuned for tool calling — enabling LLMs to use tools, query APIs, and execute multi-step workflows. Built using a block-expansion post-training method designed to preserve base-model capabilities while teaching new behaviors.

GitHub HuggingFace

Opni

SUSE

An open-source AIOps platform providing log anomaly detection, automated alerting, and multi-cluster observability across Kubernetes environments.

opni.io

AI for Climate Grand Challenge — Expert Reviewer

Bezos Earth Fund

Served on the expert review panel for the Bezos Earth Fund's $100M AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge — evaluating grant proposals at the intersection of modern AI, climate science, and biodiversity conservation.

Review panel

AI Hardware Supply Chain

Interactive research guide

An interactive guide to the physical stack behind AI systems, from EUV lithography and advanced packaging through accelerators, data centers, cloud infrastructure, and AI labs.

chips.sanjay920.com

Speaking Engagements

FinTech Forward Summit

Stanford GSB · Stanford, CA

2026

Fine-Tuning LLMs for Multi-Turn Function Calling

MLOps Community · San Francisco, CA

2024

Keynote Speaker — AI for Multi-Cluster Kubernetes

SUSECON 2023 · Munich, Germany

2023

Multi Cluster Observability and AIOps with Opni

Cloud Native Rejekts NA · Detroit, MI

2022

Setting up a Logging Stack in 5 Minutes

Cloud Native Rejekts · Detroit, MI

2022

Opni

SUSECON 2022 · Remote

2022

Let's Learn Opni

Kubesimplify · Remote

2021

Patents

Artificially Intelligent Security Incident and Event Management

US-11665180-B2 · 2023

AI-driven SIEM system using attention-based deep neural networks and transfer learning for real-time classification of malicious activity.

Managing Anonymous Network Connections

US-11265305-B2 · 2022

Hierarchical anonymous credential system for IoT devices using PKI and Zero-Knowledge Proofs.

Creation of Photorealistic 3D Avatars Using Deep Neural Networks

US-11138781-B1 · 2021

GAN-based pipeline for generating photorealistic 3D avatars from 2D images using style transfer and meta-learning.

Education

M.S. Computer Science

Machine Learning

University of Southern California

B.S. Computer Science

UC San Diego

Get in touch

For product, speaking, or technical conversations, reach me by email.

sanjay@sanjay920.com

GitHub HuggingFace Rubra Models X LinkedIn