---
title: "Prem Kumar - Director of Engineering in Noida | Tal"
description: "Meet Prem Kumar, AI Engineering Leader | RAG, AI Search & Agentic Systems in Production | Director of Engineering @ InstantMarkets | LLMs · Python · Elasticsearch · MLOps based in Noida. AI stack includes gemini, hermes agent, and langchain."
image: "https://tal.club/meet/prem-kumar-11/share-image"
---

# Prem Kumar on Tal

## Headline

AI Engineering Leader \| RAG, AI Search & Agentic Systems in Production \| Director of Engineering @ InstantMarkets \| LLMs · Python · Elasticsearch · MLOps

## About

I build AI systems that go into production and stay there — and I lead the teams that keep them running\. For the last 11 years I've been at InstantMarkets, moving from software engineer to Director of Engineering\. Today I own architecture, roadmap, and delivery for a public procurement intelligence platform that ingests millions of documents from thousands of external sources and makes them searchable and answerable\. I plan directly with the CEO\. I still write code\. What I actually do: → AI search & RAG — Designed enterprise search and conversational retrieval over a document corpus in the millions\. Hybrid retrieval, relevance tuning, and grounded answers on messy real\-world procurement data\. → Agentic automation — LLM\-driven workflows that take manual document triage and classification steps out of the pipeline entirely\. → ML platform & MLOps — Experimentation, evaluation, and monitoring pipelines so model and retrieval changes ship against measured baselines, not guesswork\. → Applied research that pays for itself — Wrote an adaptive crawl scheduler in Rust \(Thompson Sampling with Beta priors, Whittle Index\) after finding \~98% of crawl resources were being spent re\-fetching unchanged pages\. Simulation showed \~80% crawl volume reduction\. → Leading engineers — 12–15 people across backend, frontend, AI/ML, DevOps, and QA\. Hiring, architecture review, delivery, reliability, and cloud cost\. Alongside my core role I've shipped for other teams: enterprise AI/ML monitoring at Vianai Systems — drift, data quality, and bias monitoring across tabular, image, and large language models — and a computer vision platform for Clove Dental\. Stack I reach for: Python, LLMs and RAG frameworks, Elasticsearch, gRPC/REST, AWS and Azure, Docker/Kubernetes, Rust when latency matters\. Happy to talk retrieval quality, evaluation, or what it actually takes to run AI in production\. → prem6667@outlook\.com

## Location

Noida

## AI stack

gemini

hermes agent

langchain

langgraph

TruLens

vLLM

## Work experience

Director of Engineering at Instant Systems, Inc\., Oct 2019 \- Present · 7 yrs, Hybrid, • Own architecture, roadmap, and delivery for a procurement intelligence platform processing millions of documents from thousands of external sources; plan technical strategy directly with the CEO\. • Lead 12–15 engineers across backend, frontend, AI/ML, DevOps, and QA — hiring, technical direction, and delivery accountability\. • Architected enterprise AI search and conversational retrieval \(RAG\) across the full corpus, moving users from keyword search to grounded, answerable results\. • Built agentic automation into document ingestion and classification, removing manual triage from the pipeline\. • Established MLOps workflows for experimentation, evaluation, and monitoring so retrieval and model changes ship against measured baselines\. • Designed an adaptive crawl scheduler in Rust \(Thompson Sampling with Beta priors, Whittle Index\) after diagnosing \~98% of crawl spend going to unchanged content; simulation showed \~80% crawl volume reduction\. • Delivered secure REST and gRPC services with production monitoring, and drove cloud cost optimization across the platform\.

AI/ML Engineer \(Contract\) at Vianai Systems, Inc\., Oct 2022 \- May 2024 · 1 yr 8 mos, India, Contract engagement supporting Vianai's enterprise AI platform work alongside my role at Instant Systems\. • Contributed to Hila, Vianai's enterprise AI/ML platform, and VIANOPS, its high\-scale model monitoring product\. • Built monitoring for feature and prediction drift, data quality, and bias/fairness across tabular, unstructured/image, and large language models\. • Worked on real\-time root\-cause analysis surfacing the high\-risk segments driving model degradation\. • Delivered Python and full\-stack services integrating the platform across multiple clouds and data sources\.

Software Engineer at Instant Systems, Inc\., Oct 2015 \- Oct 2019 · 4 yrs 1 mo, On\-site, • Led the migration from Apache Solr to Elasticsearch, rebuilding indexing and relevance for the platform's core search\. • Built web\-acquisition frameworks \(PhantomJS, CasperJS, Puppeteer\) to collect and normalize procurement data from thousands of heterogeneous public sources\. • Engineered document\-intelligence and NLP pipelines with Apache Tika and Python for extraction, parsing, and classification at scale\. • Managed a team of 4–5 developers while owning AWS infrastructure and CI/CD across production environments\.

## Education

B\.Tech / B\.E\., Computer Engineering, Bundelkhand Institute of Engineering and Technology, Jhansi

[View the original profile](https://tal.club/meet/prem-kumar-11)

```json
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@graph": [
    {
      "@type": "Person",
      "@id": "https://tal.club/meet/prem-kumar-11#person",
      "name": "Prem Kumar",
      "url": "https://tal.club/meet/prem-kumar-11",
      "image": "https://tal.club/meet/prem-kumar-11/profile-photo.jpg",
      "description": "Meet Prem Kumar, AI Engineering Leader | RAG, AI Search & Agentic Systems in Production | Director of Engineering @ InstantMarkets | LLMs · Python · Elasticsearch · MLOps based in Noida. AI stack includes gemini, hermes agent, and langchain.",
      "jobTitle": "Director of Engineering",
      "worksFor": {
        "@type": "Organization",
        "name": "Instant Systems, Inc."
      },
      "hasOccupation": {
        "@type": "Occupation",
        "name": "Director of Engineering"
      },
      "homeLocation": {
        "@type": "Place",
        "name": "Noida"
      },
      "alumniOf": [
        {
          "@type": "EducationalOrganization",
          "name": "Bundelkhand Institute of Engineering and Technology, Jhansi"
        }
      ],
      "knowsAbout": [
        "gemini",
        "hermes agent",
        "langchain",
        "langgraph",
        "TruLens",
        "vLLM"
      ],
      "mainEntityOfPage": {
        "@id": "https://tal.club/meet/prem-kumar-11#webpage"
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "ProfilePage",
      "@id": "https://tal.club/meet/prem-kumar-11#webpage",
      "url": "https://tal.club/meet/prem-kumar-11",
      "name": "Prem Kumar on Tal",
      "description": "Meet Prem Kumar, AI Engineering Leader | RAG, AI Search & Agentic Systems in Production | Director of Engineering @ InstantMarkets | LLMs · Python · Elasticsearch · MLOps based in Noida. AI stack includes gemini, hermes agent, and langchain.",
      "dateModified": "2026-09-30T21:10:24.109Z",
      "isPartOf": {
        "@id": "https://tal.club/#website"
      },
      "mainEntity": {
        "@id": "https://tal.club/meet/prem-kumar-11#person"
      },
      "primaryImageOfPage": {
        "@type": "ImageObject",
        "url": "https://tal.club/meet/prem-kumar-11/profile-photo.jpg",
        "contentUrl": "https://tal.club/meet/prem-kumar-11/profile-photo.jpg",
        "caption": "Prem Kumar profile photo on Tal"
      },
      "inLanguage": "en-IN"
    }
  ]
}
```