Snehal Nair

Senior AI Engineering Leader | Head of AI & Innovations

Edinburgh, UK | snehal.1409@gmail.com | Linkedin | Medium | Visit My Website

Executive Summary

Senior-level Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) leader with 10+ years of global experience delivering enterprise AI strategy, platform scaling, and applied innovation. Proven success in building AI functions from inception, scaling teams from 0 to 12+ members, and deploying production-grade Generative AI (GenAI) and Agentic RAG systems. Published researcher (ACM KDD 2025) focused on the economic optimization of LLMs and high-stakes AI governance. Expert at aligning technical rigor with business growth, having delivered 50M+ in measurable impact.

Core Competencies

  • Strategy & Leadership: AI Roadmap Execution, Enterprise AI Governance, Cross-Functional Team Building, Global Stakeholder Management.
  • Generative AI & LLMOps: Agentic AI Systems, Multi-stage RAG/GraphRAG, Self-Critiquing Pipelines, Cost-Aware Prompt Optimization.
  • Applied Machine Learning: Personalization (MAB), Learning-to-Rank (LTR), NLP/ABSA, Computer Vision, Real-Time ML Infrastructure.
  • Operational Excellence: MLOps, Ablation-First Research Culture, Automated Safety Gates, Latency Optimization (<50ms P95).

Professional Experience

Viator (Tripadvisor Group) | London, UK

Machine Learning Manager (Head of AI function) | Mar 2022 - Dec 2025

  • AI Function Inception: Built and scaled the AI function from 0 to 12+ Principal and Senior Scientists, establishing an “Ablation-First” culture that justified every deployment via ROI and cost-performance.
  • Strategic Impact: Delivered 50M+ in business impact through a suite of AI products, including Search Optimization, Personalized Recommendations, and Image Enhancements.
  • GenAI & LLMOps: Built policy-compliant LLM infrastructure (AWS, TogetherAI) with traffic control and observability, reducing cost-per-inference by 27%.
  • Responsible AI Governance: Designed a “Critic-at-the-Edge” Safety Gate that reduced high-risk incidents by 92% with <10ms validation latency.
  • Thought Leadership: Lead author for ACM KDD 2025 research on cost-aware prompt optimization; co-designed GenAI research programs with the University of Edinburgh.

Scottish Power | Glasgow, UK

Lead Data Scientist | Oct 2019 - Mar 2022

  • Predictive Analytics: Led development of statistical and ML models for energy forecasting, customer churn (propensity), and NILM-based energy disaggregation.
  • Capability Building: Founded the internal “ML Academy” to accelerate AI literacy and cross-organizational adoption of advanced analytics.

Queryclick | Edinburgh, UK

Senior Data Scientist | Sep 2019 - Sep 2020

  • High-Scale Modeling: Built deep learning attribution models (CNN-RNN, LSTM) processing 4M+ daily events; improved attribution accuracy by 30% post-cookie depreciation.

Nielsen | Dubai, UAE

Senior Data Science Manager | Jul 2012 - Oct 2016

  • Regional Leadership: Led a 15-member team delivering ML solutions in telecom, retail, and media across the Middle East and North Africa.
  • Operational Excellence: Reduced project delivery timelines from 90 days to 5 days via workflow automation; recognized with the “Excellence in Leadership Award”.

Key Technical Projects

  • Cost-Aware Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO): Built a hybrid APE-OPRO architecture that matched SOTA performance while reducing API costs by 18% and optimization time by 33%.
  • Real-Time Personalized Search (Ranker V2): Deployed a two-stage Learning-to-Rank system (LightGBM + DCN-v2) achieving a +9.5% conversion lift and reducing P95 latency to 47ms.
  • Knowledge Governance (GraphRAG): Built a self-adaptive five-stage RAG pipeline using Neo4j to manage FAQ truth propagation, reducing hallucinations by 90% and support tickets by 34%.
  • Review Summarization at Scale: Developed a multilingual ABSA and opinion clustering pipeline that reduced LLM token usage by 82% and maintained 94% theme coverage.

Technical Toolkit

  • Languages/Frameworks: Python, PyTorch, PySpark, SQL, LangChain, LangGraph, Hugging Face, BERT, BARD, LightGBM.
  • Infrastructure/Ops: AWS, BigQuery, Qdrant, Redis, Arize, Valohai, Seldon (Kubernetes), Airflow, TogetherAI.

Education

  • M.Sc. Data Science, Lancaster University, UK
  • MBA (Marketing & Analytics), Lucknow University, India
  • B.Sc. Chemistry, Mumbai University, India