Hi, my name is
Sugam Budhraja.
I'm an AI trainer (with a PhD).
I coach machines to hit their targets,
and make smarter decisions.
About Me
Introduction
I'm an AI researcher and engineer, originally from India and now based in New Zealand.
With a PhD in AI and experience building across startups and MNCs, I've spent the past few years turning ML research into real-time, scalable, and explainable AI products.
Outside of work, I sketch, hike mountains, and lose to chess engines in increasingly creative ways.
My Work Experience
April 2023 - Present
Head of Data Science @ Sahha
- Led the strategy and development of Sahha’s core AI products—health scores, biomarkers, and archetypes—shaping roadmap, research, and go-to-market direction.
- Built real-time, scalable pipelines and explainable AI models for health prediction from passive smartphone data.
- AWS
- DBT
- Databricks
- MLFlow
- Postgres
Auckland, NZ
June 2021 - February 2022
Machine Learning Engineer @ EyeInc
- Led the development of a mobile-based eye-tracking system, fine-tuning Google’s GazeNet to achieve ~1.5° accuracy—approaching clinical-grade precision at a fraction of the cost.
- Built and deployed a real-time gaze data pipeline and edge-optimized models, enabling scalable attention and behavior analytics from smartphones.
- PyTorch
- CoreML
- Swift
- Xcode
- Shopify
Auckland, NZMay - July 2019
Full Stack Intern @ Intuit
- Built a graph database-based backend system on AWS Neptune with REST APIs for querying service-to-service interactions and insights.
- Designed a web app to visualize graph structures, delivering a full-stack solution for developer usability and analytics.
- Spring Boot
- React.js
- Bootstrap
- Gremlin
Bengaluru, INMay - July 2018
Data Science Intern @ Reliance Jio
- Built a facial recognition system with spoof detection, combining models like FaceNet, Dlib, and DeepFace for secure access control.
- Optimized face matching to reduce inference time from 500ms to 6ms, enabling deployment in high-throughput environments.
- Python
- C++
- Keras
- OpenCV
- Dlib
Mumbai, IN
Some Things I’ve Built
NeuroGeMS
Interactive GUI software for multimodal biomedical research. Combines multimodal model design and MLflow experiment tracking in a seamless research workflow.
NeuWave
GUI Software for EEG brain data analysis, classification and interpretation with time-frequency and connectivity feature extraction, and ML and DL models.
NeuCube-Py
Python toolkit for NeuCube framework. Supports spatio-temporal brain data modeling using spiking neural networks.
Information Retrieval
Backend of a software that retrieves information from the web or a custom corpora (large collection of documents). Uses term weighting (tf-idf) and clustering to rank the documents.
One Shot Learning
Implemented a siamese network (based on paper) for classification of images from just one training sample. Obtained 91% accuracy on the Omniglot dataset. 1st place in Kaggle competition.
Intelligent Medicine Box
A software that uses weight sensors on a Raspberry Pi-enabled medicine box to detect anomalies in pill consumption. Supports notifications to the patient and doctor through companion android app.
What’s Next?
Get In Touch
I love connecting with people and I am always open to new opportunities. Whether you have a topic to discuss, a question to ask or just want to say hi, drop me an email and I'll get back to you!
Say Hello