Hi there 👋
Welcome! I’m Manikandan Sivanesan, and this is my learning blog where I document my journey exploring search systems and agentic AI.
This blog serves as a medium to teach my past self and document discoveries for my future self about things I’m curious about. I write about information retrieval, search systems (particularly Apache Solr), NLP, and machine learning topics.
Current Work
🔭 AI Technical Strategy Lead | Senior Principal Software Engineer @ Red Hat
Focus Areas: Agentic AI, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Reranking, Hybrid Search
Additional Links:
Talks
2020
- Using Intent Data to Optimize the Self-Solve Experience | YouTube
Activate, Virtual Search & AI Conference
How Red Hat uses intent data to automate and improve workflow efficiency for support personnel and contact centers.
2018
- Empowering Customers to Self Solve: A Findability Journey
Activate 2018
Evolution of different search techniques in our Solution Engine and the customers’ search journey.
Papers
2020
Hate Speech and Offensive Content Identification in Indo-European Languages
HASOC 2020 conferenceAbstract: This article describes our team Chrestotes’ approach to the solution submitted to HASOC 2020: Hate Speech and Offensive Content Identification in Indo-European Languages. We demonstrate an end to end solution to the fine-grained detection of hate speech in tweets. Our solution is focused on the English Task which has been split into two subtasks. Our model achieved macro-average f1-scores of 0.4969 and 0.2652 on the subtasks A and B respectively. This solution places us in the middle of the leaderboard for subtask A and first place for subtask B.
Certifications
2025
Elite AI Assisted Coding - Maven (Oct 2025)
Skills: AI assisted Development, Software DevelopmentAI Evals For Engineers & PMs - Maven (May 2025)
Solve It With Code - fast.ai / Answer.ai (Feb 2025)
Instructors: Jeremy Howard, Johno Whitaker
Hands-on course on solving real-world problems using AI-assisted development. Focused on iterative coding practices, breaking down complexity, and building functional, maintainable software.
Course Link
2024
Systematically Improving RAG Applications - Maven (Aug 2024)
Mastering LLMs: A Conference For Developers & Data Scientists - Maven (Jun 2024)
2022
International Fellowship - fast.ai Deep Learning for Coders course (2022)
Search with Machine Learning - Co:rise (Mar 2022)
2021
- Full Stack Deep Learning - Spring 2021
fastclean : Experiments to find incorrect labels in the dataset and noisy training
2020
- International Fellowship - fast.ai Deep Learning for Coders course (2020)
2016
- Machine Learning Foundations: A Case Study Approach - Coursera (Jan 2016)
2015
- Cloud Computing Applications - Coursera (Oct 2015)
2014
- Functional Programming Principles in Scale - Coursera (Jun 2014)