--- title: "Dhruv Makwana - AI Engineer in Hyderabad | Tal" description: "Meet Dhruv Makwana, AI Engineer @ Centific | Building & Fine-tuning LLMs, RAG, Agentic AI Systems | Deep Learning Researcher | GenAI · Multimodal · Computer Vision · Model Optimization based in Hyderabad. AI stack includes anthropic apis, claude code, and claude. Explore public work links including..." image: "https://tal.club/meet/dhruv-makwana/share-image" --- # Dhruv Makwana on Tal ## Headline AI Engineer @ Centific \| Building & Fine\-tuning LLMs, RAG, Agentic AI Systems \| Deep Learning Researcher \| GenAI · Multimodal · Computer Vision · Model Optimization ## About AI Engineer & Deep Learning Researcher\. 5\+ years turning research into production AI systems\. I work at the intersection of applied research and deployed systems — publishing in peer\-reviewed venues while shipping models that run in production at scale\. AT CENTIFIC, I design and deploy AI systems across LLMs, computer vision, and multimodal learning, including: \- Redesigned a law enforcement evidence\-review pipeline \(video, audio, documents\), cutting officer review time \~85% by combining deterministic techniques with narrowly\-scoped reasoning\-model calls, deployed on\-premise for data privacy\. \- Built Spanglish \(Spanish\-English code\-switched\) ASR for law enforcement, reaching 0\.1 WER through synthetic data generation and domain\-specific fine\-tuning\. \- Designed SurgQ\-VLM, a two\-stage SFT → GRPO surgical video QA model with a novel dual\-stream compressor, evaluated on a sealed 21,840\-question benchmark\. \- Built a real\-time multi\-camera security analytics pipeline combining rule\-based alerting with VLM judgment, reaching 89\.5% correct aggression/weapon alerts in live evaluation\. Before Centific, at Ignitarium and Qualitas Technologies, I worked on 6DoF pose estimation for robotics, edge\-device classification models, fault diagnosis from sensor data, and defect detection — optimizing for cloud, edge, and embedded deployment with TensorRT, TFLite, and mixed precision\. Alongside industry work, I've been an active researcher through IIT Roorkee's CANDLE Lab, with peer\-reviewed publications in venues including WACV, ICDAR, ISQED, and Elsevier, spanning low\-light image enhancement, scene text understanding, PCB defect classification, and nuclei instance segmentation\. I'm looking to go deeper into research\-driven roles — Applied Scientist / Research Scientist positions — where I can push on LLM alignment \(RLHF/GRPO\), agentic systems, and multimodal reasoning, while staying close to real deployment constraints\. Open to connecting on AI research, applied deployment, or collaboration — reach out here or at dmakwana503@gmail\.com\. ## Location Hyderabad ## AI stack anthropic apis claude code claude hugging face langgraph ChatGPT Images ## Work experience AI Engineer at Centific, Mar 2024 \- Present · 2 yrs 7 mos, Hyderabad, \- Redesigned a law enforcement case\-review pipeline for video, audio, and document evidence, cutting officer review time \~85% \(75\-90 min → 12\-15 min\) by combining deterministic techniques \(timestamp OCR, identity tracking, native\-text parsing\) with narrowly\-scoped reasoning\-model calls, deployed on\-premise for data privacy compliance\. \- Built Spanglish \(Spanish\-English code\-switched\) speech recognition for law enforcement, reaching 0\.1 WER by generating synthetic conversational training data from expert\-identified critical word lists and pretraining on novel concatenated English\-Spanish corpora before domain\-specific fine\-tuning\. \- Built a real\-time multi\-camera security video analytics pipeline combining deterministic rule\-based alerting with scoped VLM judgment and a correlating decision\-layer agent, achieving 66\.7% recall at 80% precision on unattended\-package detection and 89\.5% correct aggression/weapon alerts in live evaluation\. \- Designed and trained SurgQ\-VLM, a two\-stage \(SFT → GRPO\) surgical video QA model with a novel bidirectional question\-conditioned dual\-stream compressor, reaching 0\.779 keyword accuracy and a 10x BLEU\-4 gain over zero\-shot on a sealed 21,840\-question benchmark\. \- Built an LLM\-powered data structuring pipeline for a food delivery client using GPT\-4 and LangChain to normalize raw product data into schema\-compliant structured outputs, with a GPT\-4\-as\-judge quality gate that auto\-approved \~90% of rows and reduced manual review effort by 85%\. AI Engineer at Ignitarium, Dec 2021 \- Jan 2024 · 2 yrs 2 mos, Bengaluru, \- Developed a 6DoF pose estimation pipeline for robotic arm pickup of small industrial parts, resolving severe data scarcity via 3D mesh rendering for synthetic training data generation, multi\-class YOLOv8 detection, and MegaPose for pose estimation\. \- Developed and implemented high\-performance computation kernels, reducing system latency in data transformations and computer vision tasks, improving processing speeds and system efficiency by 2x\. \- Built a lightweight multitask CNN for gender \(binary\) and age\-group \(4\-class\) classification on a custom edge device, combining multiple Asian face datasets to overcome data scarcity and achieving 94% accuracy\. \- Designed a prototype solution for fault diagnosis from machinery sensor signal data, achieving 98% accuracy for fault classification utilizing Fourier and wavelet\-based noise reduction with LSTM and dilated convolution layers\. Research Intern at IIT Roorkee — CANDLE Research Lab \(with Dr\. Sparsh Mittal\), Nov 2021 \- Oct 2024 · 3 yrs, Roorkee, Conducted research across computer vision and multimodal learning, contributing as first, second, or third author across 5\+ projects resulting in publications at WACV, ICDAR, ISQED, and Elsevier venues\. \- Led research on PCB component detection/segmentation for recycling and low\-light image enhancement as first author — defined the research problem, reviewed prior work, designed and implemented custom modules to address their limitations, and ran experiments on the FICS PCB dataset and LOLv1 dataset\. \- Contributed as second author to research on scene\-text removal and PCB component classification\. \- Contributed to global Fourier self\-attention for multimodal downstream tasks and nuclei instance segmentation as third author, including experiments on prior methods and data/post\-processing pipelines\. \- Co\-authored paper writing and prepared responses to anticipated reviewer questions across multiple submissions\. Associate Machine Learning Engineer at Qualitas Technologies Pvt Ltd, Jan 2021 \- Dec 2021 · 1 yr, Bengaluru, \- Developed and implemented Faster R\-CNN and SSD\-based object detection models, achieving more than 95% mAP for chassis number detection\. \- Implemented DeepLabV3 segmentation for manufacturing defect detection and optimized inference using TensorRT, OpenVINO, mixed precision, and INT8 quantization, achieving \~35% latency reduction with less than 1% accuracy drop\. \- Reduced manual image annotation effort by \~90% by designing and building an active learning pipeline \(Faster R\-CNN pseudo\-labeling \+ confidence filtering\) for manufacturing inspection data, cutting labeling time from \~83 hours to \~8 hours per 10K\-image project\. Machine Learning Intern at Qualitas Technologies Pvt Ltd, Sep 2020 \- Jan 2021 · 5 mos, Bengaluru, \- Designed a novel and custom computer vision architecture and developed data‑memory efficient pipelines for computer vision/deep learning‑based applications, utilizing advanced techniques and industry best practices to optimize system performance and enhance efficiency\. ## Education Bachelor of Engineering \- BE, Computer Science, LJ Institute of Engineering and Technology ## Public links - github: https://github\.com/dhruvmakwana - dhruvmakwana\.github\.io: https://dhruvmakwana\.github\.io/ [View the original profile](https://tal.club/meet/dhruv-makwana) ```json { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@graph": [ { "@type": "Person", "@id": "https://tal.club/meet/dhruv-makwana#person", "name": "Dhruv Makwana", "url": "https://tal.club/meet/dhruv-makwana", "image": "https://tal.club/meet/dhruv-makwana/profile-photo.jpg", "description": "Meet Dhruv Makwana, AI Engineer @ Centific | Building & Fine-tuning LLMs, RAG, Agentic AI Systems | Deep Learning Researcher | GenAI · Multimodal · Computer Vision · Model Optimization based in Hyderabad. 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