Guruprasad Nayak

Technical (ML) lead at AWS | PhD, Machine Learning

Seattle, Washington, United States

About

I am the technical (ML) lead for AWS's agentic AI hiring solution (Connect Talent). Learn more here - https://aws.amazon.com/products/connect/talent/ Previously, I led ads in Rufus - Amazon’s agentic AI powered shopping assistant. I have 13+ years of experience in data science and machine learning, including 6.5+ years of industry experience with deep technical expertise in generative AI, agentic architectures, autoML, time series forecasting and semi-supervised learning -- supported by 20+ publications and 300+ citations. Regular contributor and reviewer for top ML and AI conferences -- my Google scholar profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=rX_qvDYAAAAJ&hl=en I enjoy collaborating with diverse cross-functional teams, learning from different perspectives and experiences, and using the latest in AI research to solve pressing business problems. Professional Highlights ➢ I lead ads in Rufus - Amazon’s agentic AI powered shopping assistant. Launched 3 new ad experiences in Amazon’s shopping assistant (Rufus) - product recommendations, brand curated product collections and sponsored prompts (AI-generated contextualized clickable ads), generating $ XX MM USD in annualized revenue for Amazon ads. ➢ Developed 3 LLM-based functionalities over 3 years for Amazon Q (Sagemaker Canvas), leading to 3X% YoY revenue growth and $XXM ARR as of 2025. In particular, the GenAI launches helped increase the end-to-end workflow completion within Sagemaker Canvas, increasing the ratio of completed jobs from 77% to 92%. ➢ Designed, developed, deployed and maintained the evaluation system for the advertising inventory forecasting tool on Amazon advertising’s demand side platform. This was a key component of the bi-weekly business reviews presented to the org-leadership and other product stakeholders. ➢ Worked with NASA Research Center to build models for identifying rare classes when there is a complete absence of expert labels. Applied these techniques on spatio-temporal data from satellites and produced a more reliable and comprehensive burned area database compared to the state-of-art NASA product NOTE: opinions shared on LinkedIn are my own and do not express the opinions and views of my employer.

Experience

  • Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
    Jun 2026 - Present · 1 mo

    Senior Scientist for AWS's agentic AI hiring solution (Connect Talent). Learn more here - https://aws.amazon.com/products/connect/talent/

  • Applied Science Manager at Amazon
    Jul 2025 - Jun 2026 · 1 yr

    I lead a team of 6+ talented scientists and engineers responsible for building Gen-AI driven conversational ad experiences on Amazon (search, Rufus, product detail pages). • Work on LLM post training, reasoning, personalization and agentic architectures for shopping and ads • Delivered 5+ launches covering Rufus and Amazon Search resulting in $XX MM USD in annualized revenue for Amazon ads.

  • Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
    Jun 2022 - Jun 2025 · 3 yrs 1 mo

    Developed 3 LLM-based functionalities over 3 years for Amazon Q (Sagemaker Canvas), leading to 3X% YoY revenue growth and $XXM ARR as of 2025. In particular, the GenAI launches helped increase the end-to-end workflow completion within Sagemaker Canvas, increasing the ratio of completed jobs from 77% to 92%. - Designed and developed a generative-AI based assistant data scientist for AWS Sagemaker, launched at re:invent 2024. This chat-based application is able to take your business problem, map it to a machine learning task and walk you through the required data pre-processing and model-building steps recommended for solving that task. The system automatically determines the pre-processing steps required for your data set and the best model for your task. - Designed and developed a chat-based data preparation tool within AWS Sagemaker, launched at re:invent 2023. We supported several use cases including code-generation for data transformations, SQL-generation for Q&A on the data, detecting irrelevant queries, code-generation for data visualization. - Added support for fine tuning open source deep learning models for image and text classification within AWS Sagemaker, launched during re:invent 2023. Built a library over Pytorch Lightning to enable fine tuning with different configurations including Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning (PEFT). https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/use-amazon-q-developer-to-build-ml-models-in-amazon-sagemaker-canvas/

  • Applied Scientist at Amazon
    Feb 2020 - May 2022 · 2 yrs 4 mos

    Forecasting advertising inventory on Amazon advertising's Demand Side Platform (DSP). - Designed, developed, deployed and maintained the evaluation system for the advertising inventory forecasting tool on Amazon advertising’s demand side platform. - Presented an overview of the metrics including a deep-dive of problematic forecasting units during biweekly business reviews prepared for leadership and product stakeholders.

  • Graduate Research And Teaching Assistant at University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
    Sep 2013 - Dec 2019 · 6 yrs 4 mos

    Developing machine learning solutions for global-scale land cover mapping problems like creating accurate maps of burned forests. Teaching assistant for Data Mining course taught by Prof. Vipin Kumar