HaribaskarAI Engineer
Portrait of Haribaskar Dhanabalan smiling, in a dark t-shirt, in a bright room with a plant behind him

AI Engineer · IIT Jammu alumnus

Haribaskar Dhanabalan

AI Engineer building practical LLM systems, and teaching what I learn.

Follow me on LinkedInFollow on InstagramFollow on Medium

Hi, I'm Hari

I'm an AI engineer and engineering leader with 10+ years of experience, and an alumnus of IIT Jammu. I build software that puts large language models to work on real problems, and I care most about the parts that make it dependable: good data, careful retrieval and honest evaluation.

These days I lead a team of AI engineers while staying hands-on in the code. Most of my work is taking AI from a promising prototype to something people rely on every day.

What I work on

  • Retrieval-augmented generation: search, reranking and grounded answers over real documents and knowledge graphs.
  • Agents and tool calling: systems that take actions, with guardrails and human review that keep them safe.
  • Evaluation: measuring AI systems so every change is a decision, not a guess.
  • AI governance and risk: responsible-AI standards, hallucination controls, explainability and oversight, so AI can be trusted where it matters.
  • Data engineering: the pipelines and quality checks that everything above depends on.
  • Leading AI teams: hiring, mentoring and setting the technical direction so teams ship work they're proud of.

Consulting and advisory

I help organisations move from AI curiosity to AI that delivers. That can mean shaping an AI strategy, finding the use cases worth building, reviewing an architecture, or setting up the governance and risk practices that let teams adopt AI with confidence.

I work with leadership teams and engineering teams alike, and my advice comes from building and running these systems in production, not just from theory.

Ways I can help:

  • AI strategy and use-case prioritisation
  • Architecture reviews for RAG and agentic systems
  • AI governance, risk assessment and responsible-AI frameworks
  • Building and upskilling in-house AI teams

Teaching and speaking

I run hands-on workshops where participants leave having built something. I also speak at developer communities and colleges about AI engineering, responsible AI and careers in the field. I enjoy helping engineers early in their careers: I've mentored more than 10 interns and coached the engineers on my own teams.

Topics I often cover:

  • Building RAG systems that actually work
  • Taking AI from prototype to production
  • Evaluating LLM applications
  • AI governance and risk in practice
  • Growing a career in AI engineering

Elsewhere

I share every new post on LinkedIn. If you'd like me to speak at your event, run a workshop or talk about an advisory engagement, send me a message there. You can also find my code on GitHub.

Speaker kit

For organisers: bios, photos and past talks to introduce me at your event.

Short bio

AI Engineer and technology leader with 10+ years of experience building AI products that solve real business problems. I lead engineering teams while staying hands-on, and I'm passionate about practical, responsible AI.

Long bio

Haribaskar Dhanabalan is an AI Engineer and technology leader with 10+ years of experience turning complex business challenges into reliable, production-ready AI solutions. His career spans the full life of AI products: understanding the problem, shaping the solution, building it, and seeing it through to real-world adoption and impact.

As a leader, Haribaskar builds and mentors high-performing engineering teams while staying hands-on in architecture and code. He believes the best AI leaders are close to the work. They set a clear technical direction, keep quality high, and help their teams grow through ownership and continuous learning. He has built teams from the ground up, guided engineers early in their careers, and worked closely with business stakeholders to make sure AI delivers measurable value.

His approach centres on trust and practicality. He believes AI should be dependable, transparent and responsible, and that it should make people's work easier rather than more complicated. He has delivered AI solutions across several industries, consistently automating time-consuming work so teams can focus on higher-value decisions.

Haribaskar holds a master's degree in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning from IIT Jammu, where he graduated at the top of his class. He's passionate about the future of AI, responsible innovation and helping the next generation of AI engineers succeed.

Photos

  • Haribaskar Dhanabalan presenting at the front of a computer lab during a hands-on workshop
  • Portrait of Haribaskar Dhanabalan smiling, in a dark t-shirt, in a bright room with a plant behind him

Invite me to speak

I run hands-on workshops and give talks for meetups, companies and colleges.

Message me on LinkedInConnect with me and send a message, mentioning your event and date.

Talks and workshops

  1. WorkshopFrom Notebook to ProductionVellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Chennai · Chennai