Kunal Bhandari

zZounds.com is one of America's leading online retailers of musical instruments and audio gear. It is known for its fast and free shipping, award-winning customer service, and zero-interest payment plans. • Directed data science department, overseeing teams of managers, data scientists, engineers and business analysts to develop self-serving artificial intelligence, machine learning and BI products and solutions. • Influenced and empowered executive leadership / business partners, collaborated with marketing, finance, and operations stakeholders to cultivate data-driven culture, and define data science vision and roadmap. • Led development of 10+ high-impact data, AI / ML products across website ops, finance, digital marketing, and customer service. • Achieved 5% ($20M) net sales, redesigned loyalty program to drive customer acquisition and retention. • Cut time-to-model-deployment 50%, and web-integration time 5%, integrating feature store and using configurable MLOps web-integration framework. • Drove $8M revenue, $3M cost savings managing e-commerce risks including fraud risk, credit risk and orders cancelations. • Improved productivity by 30% through data and feature store implementation. • Created architecture, 5+ production-ready python packages to enforce standards and software engineering best practices - OOP, design-patterns, and database / SQL optimization. • Enabled integration of 300+ features into ML feature store, designed data-pipelines in python and MySQL. • Set KPIs, presented insights to C-suite, influencing strategies. • Leading the Generative AI roadmap for NLP use-cases like use review sentiment analysis, call transcriptions and chatbots, using transfer learning to train and fine-tune LLMs such as Llama2. • Spearheaded adoption of processes and frameworks to enable scalable MLOps pipelines using enterprise tools like git, docker, Kubernetes, Jira, confluence etc. • Influenced Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) integration in measurement frameworks.