Brag Sheet

Brag Sheet
Work
Research
Career
Author

VB

Published

August 30, 2025

Brag Sheet

Everyone should put together a brag sheet, show off their body of work and most importantly be proud of what they’ve accomplished so far!

In chronological order, stuff I’m proud in my work life:

Hugging Face (2022 - Now)

I play multiple roles at HF and switch between them when needed - Project Manager, Developer Advocacy, Machine Learning Engineer, Research Scientist all whilst being Individual Contributor.

Worked across Monetisation, Backend, Frontend, Advocacy, Research and Open Source teams.

  • Led the release of some of the most impactful open models (OpenAI gpt-oss, Meta Llama 3 and above, Google Gemma and more)
  • Scaled pivotal initiatives like Enterprise Hub, Notebooks, Inference Providers, ZeroGPU from scratch
  • Built tooling to foster a budding on-device ecosystem with llama.cpp, MLX, ONNX, for context a single space resulted in ~21K active GGUFs
  • Set standards for evaluations across Speech Recognition and Text to Speech with Open ASR Leaderboard + TTS Arena
  • Helped SmolLM series of models by advising on model capabilities and integrating them with WebGPU (MLC), llama.cpp, MLX
  • Spent time terminally online cultivating community feedback and dog fooding our offerings (probably my fav part of the job)
  • Created hundereds of artefacts to build an ecosystem across HF offerings via blog, github, x dot com, linkedin
  • Most importantly, put together a team of DevRels and on-device engineers I believe in more than myself

This isn’t all a solo effort, thousands of slack messages, PRs and a team that I can count on. In addition to the HF leadership team and specifically Julien who continued to encourage me to take risky bets and see them through.

Research (2020 - 2023)

  • Work on alternate attention methods Nyströmformer and Reformer for Auto Regressive Text to Speech (Tacotron + FastSpeech 2)
  • Built diffusion based post-training network for TTS (FastSpeech 2 + Shallow Diffusion)

Life

I have pivoted four times in my life so far and it’s been a joy each time:

  • Spent 2015-17 worked in sales and independent consulting for startups in India
  • 2017-2020 served as a Data Science/ Management consultant for Deloitte - helped close > 4M$ deals
  • 2020-2023 researched NLP & Speech in Stuttgart, Germany
  • 2022-Now leading Developer Experience and Community at Hugging Face

Each of these have taught me skills which I use everyday.