Hi, I'm
Raj Firke
Software Engineer (AI) at Red Hat
Building AI infrastructure, AI Researcher, Contributor in PyTorch and vLLM, Maintainer of Provena, Mentor
I work at the intersection of DevOps and AI — automating infrastructure, reducing costs, and pushing AI from prototype to production.
At Red Hat, I build MCP servers, ADK-based agents, and customer-facing automation systems used by thousands daily — designing the AI direction for tools that cut multi-day processes to minutes.
As a researcher, I study how LLM benchmarks and reasoning chains fail at scale — with two first-author papers at EMNLP 2026 and publications in Springer, IEEE, and IJERT.
On the governance side, I built Provena — context governance for agentic AI, ensuring the context flowing into AI systems is tamper-evident, auditable, and EU AI Act compliant. 30+ contributors, 3k+ PyPI downloads.
I also mentor final-year B.Tech students, helping them navigate research and build production-quality capstone work.
“Half Engineer, Half Researcher.”
Red Hat, Pune
Software Engineer (AI), Agentic Experience
December 2024 - Present
- Owning two projects end-to-end on the Attachment Diagnostics team — from architecture and technical decision-making through implementation, stakeholder alignment, and delivery.
- Built and enhanced a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server with separate internal and external tool profiles for attachment-diagnostics workflows.
- Built a Google ADK-based diagnostics agent with end-to-end auth (SSO → delegated identity → Bearer) that generates actionable troubleshooting guidance.
- Owning ASA end-to-end — a customer-facing support automation system used by thousands daily. Proposed the AI direction to evolve it from a regex-based rule engine to a hybrid AI semantic/vector engine.
- Built an AI-assisted triage workflow that cut a multi-day manual process to ~30 minutes.
- Insights Rule Generator: reduced rule validation time from 15-20 minutes to under 2 minutes.
Red Hat, Pune
Software Engineer Apprenticeship
June 2024 - December 2024
- Containerized a Python/Flask app integrated with MongoDB, RabbitMQ, and Celery, deployed on OpenShift with automated CI/CD pipelines.
- Wrote 12 diagnostic Python rules for automated issue detection, strengthening rule logic and detection accuracy.
- Deployed the Rule-Effectiveness project to QA and Stage environments, managing environment configuration and release readiness.
Persistent Systems, Pune
SDET Trainee
January 2024 - June 2024
- Intensive SDET training: Java, Selenium, Maven, and Manual Testing. Built and executed test scripts in real-time testing scenarios.
- Achieved top performance in the internship assessment.
BrainChain, Pune
Software Developer
December 2023 - April 2024
- Designed and developed an application to provide detailed statistical analysis of user data consumption which included the data consumed on YouTube, Chrome, etc.
- Utilized multithreading concepts to optimize code, resulting in a significant reduction of execution time by 73%, thereby improving overall system efficiency and performance.
- Led a team of 4 in optimizing the semantic mapping of data to specific categories, leading to a notable 23% enhancement in accuracy and efficiency, thereby facilitating precise data analysis and decision-making processes.
PCCOE, Pune
Teaching Assistant
August 2023 - November 2023
- Guided freshmen through the principles of C/C++ programming, providing hands-on instruction during lab sessions to reinforce core concepts.
- Taught fundamental data structures such as arrays, linked lists, stacks, and queues, along with key algorithms including searching and sorting, fostering a strong foundational understanding.
Persistent Systems, Pune
Martian Internship Program
June 2023 - August 2023
- Received comprehensive training in key software skills, including Database Management Systems (DBMS), Data Structures and Algorithms, Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), Linux Operating System, and Python.
- Gained hands-on experience by applying acquired skills in software development.
PHN Technology, Pune
Machine Learning & Data Science Intern
April 2023 - June 2023
- Developed and trained ML models for practical problem-solving — data cleaning, EDA, and model optimization.
- Transformed raw data into actionable insights for data-driven decision-making.
AI & Machine Learning
Core ML stack for research & production
Agentic AI
Building autonomous AI systems
Backend & Data
Server-side & storage
Cloud & DevOps
Infrastructure, containers & delivery pipelines
Dev Tooling
Practices
Provena
Context governance for agentic AI — tamper-evident audit trails, provenance validation, EU AI Act compliance. 6 framework adapters, MCP server, PostgreSQL, policy engine.
Repo Time Machine
Agentic RAG for codebases — ask questions answered by code, git history, issues & PRs. 100% local, free.
GreenBench
Benchmarking energy efficiency and carbon footprint of open-source LLM inference on Apple Silicon.
SIH 2022 — Institute Ranking
NLP web app mapping college syllabi to 33 ACM knowledge areas. National Top 5 at Smart India Hackathon.
Certificate Generator
Web app that reduced certificate creation time by 90% for college events. 4★ on GitHub.
Crypto Volatility Scanner
Real-time 1-min candle volatility scanner for all Binance USDT spot pairs. Built for scalp trading.
ML Projects Collection
House price prediction, news classification, sentiment analysis, NLP foundations, PDF summarization.
📄 Publications
The Correlation Mirage: Benchmark Dependence Collapses for Top-Performing LLMs
EMNLP 2026 Main Conference · Meta review: 4.5
OpenReview ↗When Does Reasoning Age? Survival Analysis of Step-Level Error Hazard in LLM Chains
EMNLP 2026 Main Conference · Meta review: 4.0
OpenReview ↗ GitHub ↗GreenBench: Benchmarking Energy Efficiency and Carbon Footprint of Open-Source LLM Inference on Apple Silicon
ICCUBEA 2026 (IEEE Xplore) · Pre-print on arXiv
arXiv ↗ GitHub ↗A Survey on Advanced Recommendation Systems: Content-Based Filtering, Collaborative Filtering, Hybrid and Opinion Mining Approaches
ICTIS 2025 (Springer, Scopus) · Thailand
Springer ↗Proposed Model of Hindi Book Review Sentiment Analysis
IJERT 2023 · 500+ downloads
IJERT ↗🏛️ Patents
System and Method for Utilizing Digital Footprints of a User to Generate Conversational AI Thereof
View Patent ↗Virtual Mind and Virtual Leader-Oriented Recommendation System
Provena
MaintainerContext governance for agentic AI. Tamper-evident audit trails, provenance validation, EU AI Act compliance. 6 framework adapters, MCP server, PostgreSQL.
PyTorch
Active Contributor · 25 PRsInput validation, numerical stability fixes, optimizer improvements, API enhancements, and autograd subgradient work across the core framework.
vLLM
ContributorResponses API namespace tools support for harmony/GPT-OSS models. YAML config bugfixes for the high-throughput LLM serving engine.
10th · CBSE
St. Joseph's Convent Sr. Sec. School, Jalgaon
82%12th · HSC · PCM
Swami Vivekanand Jr College, Jalgaon
State Board MHCET: 98.34 %ileB.Tech, Computer Engineering
PCCOE — Pimpri Chinchwad College of Engineering, Pune
CGPA: 8.94/10 Tier 2 College, IndiaCertificates
Google Data Analytics
- I hold the Google Data Analytics Certificate, having completed eight hands-on courses by Google.
- Skills gained: Data Aggregation, Data Cleaning, Data Ethics, Data Visualization, Spreadsheets, SQL, Structured Thinking
- Certificate: View
AWS Academy Cloud Foundations
- Cloud computing and AWS basics: service models, deployment models, serverless computing.
- Understanding AWS services: storage, compute, databases, and networking.
- Certificate: View
AWS Academy Machine Learning Foundations
- ML fundamentals on AWS, building upon cloud computing knowledge.
- Skills: AI/ML, AWS Cloud Computing, ML Foundations
- Certificate: View
Advanced C and C++ — IIT Bombay
- In-depth understanding of pointers, memory management, data structures, and OOP principles.
- Mastery of advanced C++ features: operator overloading, inheritance, polymorphism, templates.
Agentic AI Planning and Reasoning Design Patterns — LinkedIn
- Agentic AI design patterns, planning strategies, and reasoning frameworks for building autonomous AI systems.
- Certificate: View
Red Hat OpenShift Administration I — Red Hat
- Operating a production OpenShift cluster: deployment, scaling, networking, storage, and troubleshooting.
- Certificate: View
Elements of AI — MinnaLearn
- Fundamentals of artificial intelligence: machine learning, neural networks, and AI in society.
- Certificate: View