---
title: "Niharika Khanna - Research scientist intern in Bengaluru | Tal"
description: "Meet Niharika Khanna, Applied ML Research | Recommendation Systems • LLMs | Research Scientist Intern @ Rakuten based in Bengaluru. AI stack includes claude code, codex, and cursor. Explore public work links including github and leetcode."
image: "https://tal.club/meet/niharika-khanna/share-image"
---

# Niharika Khanna on Tal

## Headline

Applied ML Research \| Recommendation Systems • LLMs \| Research Scientist Intern @ Rakuten

## About

I love working on problems where machine learning can genuinely improve user experiences\. Currently exploring recommendation systems at Rakuten and finding them more interesting than I expected\. I'm particularly interested in recommendation engines, LLMs, and applied ML research, and I enjoy exploring how ideas from research can be turned into practical systems\. Always happy to connect with fellow builders and researchers\.

## Location

Bengaluru

## AI stack

claude code

codex

cursor

hugging face

notebooklm

obsidian

## Work experience

Research scientist intern at Rakuten, May 2026 \- Present · 5 mos, Bengaluru, Building user representation learning systems for recommendation and advertising using 600M\+ behavioral events from 25M\+ users\. Developed 256D user embeddings with contrastive learning, improving Recall@10 from 0\.397 to 0\.768 for next\-interaction prediction\. Applied learned embeddings to ad targeting, improving offline ROC\-AUC from 63\.69 to 67\.89 in a LightGBM model\.

ML Engineer Intern at Peakflo \(YC W22\), Apr 2026 \- May 2026 · 2 mos, Remote

GenAI Intern at EXL, Jul 2025 \- Sep 2025 · 3 mos, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India

Junior Council Member at NSCC BPIT, Oct 2023 \- Mar 2024 · 6 mos, Delhi, India

UX Researcher at Brihat Infotech, Sep 2023 \- Oct 2023 · 2 mos, Remote

Tech Team Member at NSCC BPIT, Mar 2023 \- Mar 2025 · 2 yrs 1 mo

## Education

Bachelor of Technology \- BTech, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University

12th, Little Flowers Public Sr Sec School

## Public links

- github: https://github\.com/nkhanna94
- leetcode: https://leetcode\.com/niharikakhanna

[View the original profile](https://tal.club/meet/niharika-khanna)

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