Ayush Ranjan.
Machine-learning engineer working the boring middle layer between training and the bill. Cloud architecture by necessity, software design by inclination, books by habit.
I grew up taking radios apart and never quite learned to put them back. The parts I broke at twelve are the parts I’m still curious about now — how a small, fragile system holds together; how it gets repaired; how the repair shows up later as a feature, or a scar.
Today I work as a machine-learning engineer. Most of what I do is unglamorous: inference latency, cluster economics, the slow craft of making a software system you can hold in your head. I’ve trained models. They’re not the interesting part. The interesting part is everything around them — the interfaces, the schedulers, the bills, the on-call shifts at three in the morning when the right call is “turn it off and go back to bed.”
What I care about
Three things, mostly. Software you can reason about: small surface areas, deep behaviour, clear seams. Honest measurement: real latencies, real costs, real failures, not the ones in the deck. Slow craft: the kind of careful work that compounds over months and doesn’t show up well in a sprint review.
I’m suspicious of cleverness, including my own. I’m suspicious of frameworks that ask you to commit to them before you’ve learned the shape of your problem. I’m suspicious of any system whose monitoring is more sophisticated than the system itself.
What I’m doing now
I lead the inference platform team at a mid-stage AI company. Day to day, that’s a mix of architecture work, mentoring, and writing the small essays that show up on this site. I keep a workshop of side projects on the side, mostly in service of essays I’m trying to write.
I live in Bengaluru. I read more than I finish, walk more than I run, and have a small, slow rebuild of a 1973 Royal Enfield in the corner of my flat that I will not finish in 2026.
How to write to me
Letters are welcome, even short ones. Especially short ones — I’ve gotten the best ideas of the past year from one-paragraph notes from strangers. I read everything; I reply when I can. If you’re writing about a specific essay, please mention the title in the subject line so I can find it again later.
— Ayush