Reza Soleymanifar

Production Machine Learning Scientist · Ph.D.

Production machine learning scientist with 4+ years of experience and a Ph.D. in Data Analytics, specialized in translating state-of-the-art research into production-ready AI/ML systems at scale to drive measurable impact.

Experience

Senior Machine Learning Engineer · Capital One

  • Reduced cyber threat response time by 70% by developing an agentic AI system that analyzed petabyte-scale security telemetry and automated threat containment.
  • Led a team of five junior engineers to ship a security telemetry visualization platform into production.
  • Enabled enterprise-wide adoption of agentic AI workflows across 500+ security operations personnel.

Senior Data Scientist · Ford

  • Delivered $3.7M in annual warranty-liability savings by predicting electric vehicle battery longevity early from manufacturing data.
  • Led a team of three data scientists to ship the battery life prediction model into production.
  • Deployed ML models as FastAPI microservices on Kubernetes with Docker-based CI/CD and Airflow orchestration for real-time factory execution.
  • Built ETL pipelines processing 5M+ cells per year for model training and inference.

Data Engineer · MTN

  • Built automated ETL workflows in SQL to integrate multi-source budgeting data, reducing manual effort by 80%.
  • Architected normalized relational schemas for project budgeting, improving governed financial reporting pipelines.

Selected Projects

Data Scientist Intern · Kohl's

  • Improved product recommendations by 40% using large language models and customer clickstream data.
  • Engineered an ETL pipeline processing 12B+ clickstream events into Google BigQuery for downstream modeling.
  • Fine-tuned state-of-the-art LLMs (Falcon 7B, LLaMA 2 7B, OPT) on GPUs, tailoring them to retail use cases.
  • Translated AI research papers into a production-ready recommendation system aligned with business needs.

Computer Vision Scientist Intern · Cargill

  • Implemented a computer vision safety system detecting workers in danger zones and raising real-time alarms.
  • Fine-tuned multiple object detection models (YOLO, EfficientDet, R-CNN) on imagery collected from food plant cameras.
  • Productionized the model as an AWS SageMaker endpoint, providing real-time access for engineering teams.

Education

Ph.D. in Data Analytics · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Research: designed a novel ML algorithm that navigates swarms of drones in real time to provide network access to terrestrial users.

M.Sc. in System Engineering · Sharif University of Technology

B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering · University of Tehran

Skills

Publications

  1. R. Soleymanifar, A. S. C. Beck, S. Salapaka. “A Clustering Approach to Edge Controller Placement in Software-Defined Networks with Cost Balancing.” IFAC-PapersOnLine, vol. 53, no. 2, pp. 2642–2647, 2020.
  2. R. Soleymanifar, C. Beck. “RCP: A Temporal Clustering Algorithm for Real-time Controller Placement in Mobile SDN Systems.” American Control Conference (ACC), pp. 2767–2772, 2022.
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