AI/ML Leadership · Pharma & Healthcare

Siddhartha Sandilya

Senior Manager, AI/ML Foundations — building and shipping AI platforms in regulated pharma environments.

12+ years across pharma, analytics and AI/ML. Open to Head of AI / VP-level roles — in pharma, healthcare, or beyond — where I can lead teams building production ML and generative AI systems at scale.

Based
Bengaluru, India
Current role
Sr. Manager, AI/ML Foundations — MSD (Merck)
Experience
12+ years — pharma, analytics, AI/ML
Education
M.Tech AI/ML, BITS Pilani · B.Tech ECE

About

I lead AI/ML foundations work in pharma — taking models from notebook to production under GxP constraints, and building the platforms that make that repeatable across an organization.

My path has run through MSD Merck, Axtria, Fractal Analytics, Novartis, Cognizant and Infosys — giving me both the domain depth and the delivery discipline that regulated industries demand.

Recent work includes Discover, an AI/ML model marketplace, and Muse, a RAG-based generative AI assistant, plus hands-on deployment of classification pipelines (Random Forest, XGBoost, LightGBM) on Azure ML with real-time scoring, batch inference and retraining built in.

I'm now looking for a Head of AI / VP-level role where I can own AI strategy and delivery end to end — in pharma, healthcare, or in a new industry altogether.

GxP
Production ML platforms delivered under regulated pharma governance
2
Enterprise platforms shipped — Discover (model marketplace) & Muse (RAG assistant)
1
SPARK Recognition award, Novartis — oncology call planning

What I lead

The three areas where I've built and shipped — and where I'm looking to lead next.

AI Strategy & Governance

Setting AI direction for healthcare and life-sciences organizations — use-case prioritization, GxP-aligned governance frameworks, and building the team and capability to deliver on it.

AI strategy Governance Team building

Pharma & Commercial Analytics

Field-force and commercial analytics for pharma — call planning, marketing-lead scoring, and forecasting built on real prescriber and market data.

Call planning Lead scoring Forecasting

ML Platforms & Generative AI

End-to-end ML delivery — model development, MLOps and production deployment on Azure ML, and RAG / generative AI applications built for enterprise use.

Azure ML MLOps RAG / GenAI

Selected work

2025–26
Marketing Lead Classifier — Azure ML
Production-ready deployment package for a lead interest-level classifier — Random Forest, XGBoost and LightGBM — with a real-time API, batch scoring and an automated retraining pipeline.
Deployed · MSD
MSD
Muse — Generative AI Assistant
RAG-based generative AI chatbot built for enterprise use inside a GxP-regulated environment.
Production
MSD
Discover — AI/ML Model Marketplace
Internal platform for discovering, governing and reusing AI/ML models across the organization.
Production
Novartis
Oncology Call Planning
Field-force call planning model for oncology — recognized with a SPARK Recognition award.
Award
Portfolio
California Housing Regression
End-to-end regression project — data exploration, feature engineering, model comparison and evaluation.

Career log

MSD (Merck)
Senior Manager, AI/ML Foundations
Current
Axtria
Analytics & AI/ML
Fractal Analytics
Analytics & AI/ML
Novartis
Oncology call planning · SPARK award
Cognizant
Analytics
Infosys
Analytics

Let's talk

Open to Head of AI / VP-level conversations — in pharma, healthcare, or elsewhere.