Hema Harsha Vardhan Peela

AI/ML Engineer · Austin, TX

I build AI agents that answer from real data, and the pipelines underneath them.

I'm the technical lead for two AI agent products at Johnson & Johnson. Before that I ran a RAG pipeline at Wells Fargo that served 5M+ LLM inferences a month, after starting out in large-scale data engineering. Four years in total.

Selected work

Three systems I've built or led, and how each one is put together.

Johnson & Johnson · 2026 · Technical lead, team of four

JJ Customer Connect AI Agent

An assistant that answers B2B customers' order, invoice, and product questions from live J&J data.

Built with Langflow and FastAPI. A router sends each question down a semantic or an analytical path, and eight live J&J APIs ground the answer in that customer's real-time data.

I deployed the custom backend and the Langflow workflow on AWS Bedrock AgentCore myself, with OAuth 2.0 token-based authorization verified against the client's database and user-scoped conversation storage in RDS PostgreSQL.

24 / 25
development test cases passed
~4 s
typical response time
8
live APIs integrated
Customer questionOAuth 2.0 token checked first
Router
Semantic path
Analytical path
8 live J&J APIsorders · invoices · products
Grounded answerconversation saved per user in RDS PostgreSQL
Runs on AWS Bedrock AgentCore

Johnson & Johnson · 2026 · Technical lead, team of five

SAVIA, a multi-agent SDLC assistant

It reads requirements from documents, recordings, and text, then recommends the SDLC agents to run on them.

I built the Python, FastAPI, and Azure OpenAI backend. The specialist agents share a base class, a registry, and one API, so adding an agent takes one implementation file and one registry entry.

Outputs are grounded in the source input, which removed invented names, dates, and figures. Test coverage is calculated from story-to-test mappings. Reviewers get section-level edit suggestions, open-question resolution, and recorded sign-off before export.

38
backend tests, plus sample inputs for every agent
1 + 1
file and registry entry to add an agent
3
export formats: Word, Excel, PowerPoint
Requirements indocuments · recordings · text
Agent registryrecommends which agents to run
Specialist agent
+ new agent1 file, 1 entry
Review and approvaledit suggestions · open questions · sign-off
ExportWord · Excel · PowerPoint
Every agent extends one shared base class

Wells Fargo · 2025 to 2026 · AI/ML Engineer

Agentic RAG, and the evaluation around it

A production retrieval pipeline for customer service and cross-functional teams, in a regulated environment.

The pipeline does multi-step reasoning over Pinecone vector search, OpenAI embeddings, and knowledge graphs. Python and Spark pipelines feed it by unifying structured and unstructured sources across 8 financial use cases, with automated data quality checks.

I designed the evaluation framework that gates releases: LLM-as-judge scoring, canary deployments, and audit-driven feedback loops. I also shipped 7 production NLP and LLM models, fine-tuned with LoRA and deployed through Airflow CI/CD with PII guardrails.

5M+
LLM inferences served per month
~30%
fewer hallucinations
7
production models shipped
Question
Multi-step reasoning
Pineconevector search
Knowledge graph
Answer

Before any release

LLM-as-judge scoring
Canary deployment
Audit feedback loop
Quality regressions get caught before they ship

Experience

Aug 2026 to present

AI/ML Engineer, Technical Lead · Johnson & Johnson

Leading two AI agent products, JJ Customer Connect and SAVIA, built on AWS and Azure OpenAI.

May 2025 to Jul 2026

AI/ML Engineer · Wells Fargo

Production agentic RAG at 5M+ inferences a month, an LLM evaluation framework, and 7 shipped models.

Nov 2024 to May 2025

Data Engineer Intern · YourBook Team

Built 10+ Power BI and Tableau dashboards with SQL, Python, and R validation checks, and kept 50+ data quality issues out of stakeholder reports.

Aug 2021 to Jul 2023

Data Engineer · Cognizant

Raised pipeline success from 91% to 98%+ across 50TB+ of data on Hadoop, Hive, and Kafka. Supported 2.5M+ daily transactions and unified 150K+ patient records a month with PII redaction.

Graduated May 2025

M.S. Computer Science · Texas Tech University

GPA 3.7 / 4.0

Skills

Languages
Python, SQL, R
AI/ML and LLMs
LLMs, RAG, agentic AI, multi-agent systems, LLM evaluation (LLM-as-judge), LoRA fine-tuning, NLP, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Azure OpenAI, OpenAI, Groq, Whisper, Langflow
Retrieval
Pinecone, vector databases, embeddings, knowledge graphs
Backend and APIs
FastAPI, REST APIs, JWT authentication, LDAP / Active Directory, OAuth 2.0
Data engineering
Spark / PySpark, Airflow, Kafka, Hadoop, Hive, dbt, Informatica, Delta Lake, ETL / ELT
Cloud and platforms
AWS (Bedrock AgentCore, EC2, Glue, Redshift, RDS PostgreSQL), Snowflake
DevOps and BI
CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Jira, Power BI, Tableau

Side project

NYC Taxi Demand Pipeline

PySpark · Delta Lake · Snowflake · dbt · Airflow · GitHub Actions

An end-to-end medallion pipeline (bronze, silver, gold) that turns 9.5M raw taxi trips into analytics-ready demand data, loaded into Snowflake and orchestrated with Airflow. Tracking down a Snowflake file-partitioning bug got rid of duplicate rows, missing records, and wrong dates. 32 dbt tests now run on every change through GitHub Actions.