# About me

Author: Vishal Bhargava
Canonical URL: https://vbhargava.org/about/

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I'm Vishal Bhargava. I build and run systems that have to work in the real world — not just in clean diagrams.

Most of my career has been platform and infrastructure work: delivery pipelines, internal tooling, and the foundations other engineers depend on. Twelve years of it. I tend to care about reliability, debugging, and cost more than novelty.

These days I apply that same platform mindset to LLM systems — not from a research angle, but an operational one. How they get deployed, observed, and paid for. The part I keep coming back to is **inference cost**: it's the line item that surprises teams, it's rarely measured properly, and it's usually treated as a model problem when it's an infrastructure problem. Measurement, routing, and serving efficiency move it far more than swapping models does.

## What I'm working on

- **[ritam](https://github.com/bhvishal9/ritam)** — an end-to-end RAG service (API, infra, evals, dashboards) I keep building in the open as a way to work through these problems properly rather than theoretically.
- **Cost and latency per stage** — embed → retrieve → generate, measured rather than guessed.
- **Retrieval quality** — chunking, hybrid search, and evals that tell you whether a change actually helped.

## Quick facts

- Platform/infrastructure engineer, ~12 years across AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform
- Tech Lead Manager, Platform @ Kittl — remote, for a Berlin team
- Based in **Dubai** since early 2026, after seven years in Berlin

Outside of work, I care a lot about food. I cook often, experiment a lot, and probably overthink simple dishes more than necessary. It's one of the few places where I enjoy slowing down and paying attention to small details.

This site is where I write things down — about work, projects, and change — when they're worth thinking through properly.

## Get in touch

If you're running LLM systems in production and wrestling with inference cost, serving, retrieval, or evals, I'd like to hear about it. Mail me at [vishal@vbhargava.org](mailto:vishal@vbhargava.org) — I read everything and reply to most of it.

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You can also find me on:

[GitHub](https://github.com/bhvishal9)
[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhvishal9/)
[Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/culinaryvoyagewithvishal/)