Ayesha Siddiqa on Tal
Headline
Applied AI @ Flipkart | Lead Data Scientist | Agentic systems · LLM fine-tuning & post-training · Multilingual NLP
About
For ~8 years at Flipkart, I've worked at the intersection of applied research and production ML: conversational AI, LLMs and SLMs, RAG, Agentic AI systems, and multilingual NLP. I lead the CX Data Science team, where we own the AI behind post-order customer experience — from the chatbot that picks up your order context, to the copilot a human agent uses while talking to you. Some highlights from the journey so far: → The Agent Chat Copilot cut Average Handling Time by 50%, now runs 90K+ chats a day → Flipkart's in-house RAG framework (Instant Karma 2024) and a RAFT pipeline that beat GPT-3.5 on customer-support QA. → NER for Voice & Text Search / Decision Assistant — reduced support cost by 10% and delivered bottom-line savings. → Expanded vernacular NLP coverage from 5 to 12 Indian languages for agent-notes Summarization through Google collaboration utilising Gemini models for STT. Currently, my focus is agentic AI for post-purchase CX — moving from hardcoded orchestration to a reinforcement-learning-based system (DQN inside an agentic layer, treating the journey as an MDP) that learns from actual user feedback instead of static rules. Outside of shipping, I mentor junior scientists, translate research for business stakeholders (including the less glamorous but essential work of GenAI infra-cost estimation and ROI modelling), and publish — most recently accepted at SIGIR 2026, previously at KDD e-commerce 2022, Springer LNAI, and CICLING. Stack: PyTorch, HuggingFace, Haystack, Google ADK, Unsloth. Models I've fine-tuned and deployed in production: Llama, Mistral, Gemma 3, GPT/Gemini variants, BLIP2, ColQwen2, mBERT/mBART/XLM.
Work experience
Senior Data Scientist 2 at Flipkart, Mar 2026 - Present · 6 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Senior Data Scientist at Flipkart, Aug 2023 - Jan 2026 · 2 yrs 6 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Data Scientist 3 at Flipkart, Sep 2021 - Aug 2023 · 2 yrs
Data Scientist 2 at Flipkart, Jul 2018 - Aug 2021 · 3 yrs 2 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Research Scholar at IIT MADRAS, Jan 2014 - 2017 · 3 yrs 1 mo, Greater Chennai Area
Education
Master’s Degree, Computer Science - Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
Master's degree, Computer Science, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
