Kesavsundar Gopalakrishnan🇺🇸

About Kesavsundar Gopalakrishnan

Principal Engineer at Microsoft CoreAI

I'm Kesavsundar, a Principal Engineer at Microsoft CoreAI with over a decade of experience at Microsoft and Amazon. I build AI systems that can learn, make decisions, and take action in the real world, bringing together machine learning, distributed systems, product thinking, and responsible engineering.

My experience spans reinforcement learning, large-scale decision systems, generative AI, autonomous agents, and AI safety. At Amazon, I co-developed and brought into production exploration methods for industrial reinforcement learning, and later led the external-web catalog and agent-readiness architecture for Buy For Me, Amazon's AI shopping agent. At Microsoft CoreAI, my work focuses on turning advanced model capabilities and safety research into reliable systems for deployment and operation.

Across these roles, I've led initiatives from early problem definition through architecture, experimentation, launch, and ongoing operation. I've worked closely with scientists, engineers, and product leaders to navigate uncertainty, make technical trade-offs, and connect engineering decisions to customer and business outcomes. I also contribute through research authorship, engineering mentorship, AI competition judging, and computing conference peer review.

As a mentor, I can help with growing from an individual contributor into a technical leader, developing stronger system design and architectural judgment, building a career in AI and machine learning, and taking ambitious ideas from prototype to production. I also enjoy helping founders and engineering teams assess AI opportunities and make practical decisions about feasibility, evaluation, cost, reliability, and safety.

My approach is collaborative and grounded in your goals: understand the challenge, work through the trade-offs, and leave with concrete next steps.

Sessions with Kesavsundar Gopalakrishnan

• General Mentorship Session (30 min)