Anishek
Kamal
Founder & AI Architect · Startup Advisor
I build AI products like Toya and advise AI startups on strategy and architecture. I've spent 10+ years shipping production AI and data systems at enterprise scale with Microsoft, Lululemon, and Press Ganey. I also mentor engineers moving into data and AI.
4.9/5
Rating across 34 sessions on Topmate
4
Startups I actively advise
400+
Engineers mentored in data and AI
I build AI products and help others ship theirs.
I'm Anishek Kamal. I'm the founder of Toya and two other products, technical advisor to AI and health-tech startups, and I've spent 10+ years shipping AI and data systems into production for enterprise customers.
I do that work today as a Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft, where I build applications with OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, and LangChain for enterprise customers.
I also mentor 400+ engineers and founders navigating career growth in data and AI.
10+
Years Shipping AI
4
Startups Advised
3
Products Live
400+
Engineers Mentored
Startups I advise
I advise early-stage AI and health-tech startups on AI strategy, architecture, and go-to-market, and invest as an angel where I can add more than money.
Invarium AI
MCP-native QA engine for AI agents. It catches behavioral failures and process shortcuts that traditional evals miss.
UGenome
Making genomic medicine personal and accessible through individual genetic profiles.
Mednoia
AI-powered diagnostic assistant unifying imaging, genomics, and biomarkers for earlier cancer detection.
Nobletouch Foundation
Empowering underprivileged women and children through education, healthcare, and community resources.
Building something and want an advisor's eye?
Reach outWhat I am building
AI, FinTech, and DevOps products I ship outside Microsoft. Each one solves a problem I personally lived through or couldn't find a good answer for.
Toya
usetoya.com
"Your money, finally making sense."
I started Toya after digging myself out of six-figure personal debt. It turns financial chaos into clear, actionable steps.
Unconfuse
unconfuse.io
"Clarity for your career journey."
Unconfuse connects professionals with mentors for one-on-one career guidance. It serves people navigating career transitions, building a personal brand, or needing a trusted advisor.
VibeDrift
www.vibedrift.ai
"Stop your AI agent from getting worse as your project grows."
An open source tool I am building with a friend. AI coding agents forget your patterns, repeat code, and break what worked as a project grows. VibeDrift catches the drift, fixes it, and gives your agent the context to stop making it.
Want to build one of these projects together?
If you're ready to contribute, collaborate, or co-create, let's talk about how we can work together.
What people say after working with me
"Anishek was fantastic at helping me to understand key concepts and gave actionable career advice. I will definitely be interested in further mentoring/consulting from Anishek in the future."
Joe Wallace
Career mentorship
"Anishek is warm, encouraging and intelligent. He generously shares his wide technical and business experience."
Paul Priest
Technical & business mentorship
"Anishek has a very clear and well defined grasp on what it takes to succeed in data roles. His ability to quickly take my details and turn that around into actionable ways to boost my personal brand is really, really valuable."
Kevin McQuown
Data career mentorship
"In a succinct and cohesive manner, Anishek was able to provide me clear guidance on how to move forward in this career transition without it being overwhelming. Shocked that he was able to do this in such a short amount of time."
Sana Asghar
Career transition guidance
"A lot of value delivered in a short period of time. Appreciated the emphasis on concepts and principles over specific tooling. Helped me to narrow down the key areas of focus in a field of seemingly limitless options."
Tom Curran
Technical mentorship
"He was incredibly knowledgeable, patient, and insightful. He took the time to understand my background and provided practical guidance tailored to my goals. I left the session with much more clarity and a solid action plan."
Anonymous
Career mentorship
Show more testimonials
"He was able to provide me with next steps that I need to take to keep moving forward towards my goal. I also came to know about few things that I should focus on that will help me in the long run."
Chetan
Career mentorship
"Anishek just gave me a full picture of the Data Engineering concepts and helped me to focus on the key parts that I have to learn in order to succeed in the field."
Luiz Serra
Data engineering guidance
"Ani's high-level explanation of core concepts related to cloud computing helped me curate a better understanding of my learning plan."
Mahmud
Cloud computing guidance
"The session with Anishek was really insightful. I will definitely work on all the suggestions that were provided."
Jeffy Jaxon
Career mentorship
"Extremely friendly and helpful in providing insights on what to prepare and what to expect when going into the industry."
Dennis Lim
Industry guidance
"A very good conversation, with meaningful insights. Super helpful to have such good guidance in a 20–25 min call."
Osmani Diaz
Career guidance
"Anishek helped me understand the beginning concepts of Data Engineering."
Tyler McGuckin
Data engineering guidance
"He addressed all my doubts about selection processes for data engineering positions, and that was exactly what I needed at this moment."
George Sousa Versiani Mendes
Data engineering guidance
"He was able to guide me with a step by step process I can follow to get to my goal of data engineer and cloud path."
Vipul Patni
Data engineering guidance
"Anishek was very generous with his time and knowledge in the field. He provided valuable advice that covered all the important aspects of data engineering I would need to know."
Amey Kokane
Data engineering guidance
How I can help
AI architecture, data engineering consulting, and career mentorship for engineers shipping in production and founders building with AI.
1:1 Career Mentorship in Data and AI
You're figuring out your next career move. You want to break into data or AI. You need someone who's done it before. This is that session. No fluff, just honest guidance from 10+ years in the field.
Data & AI Architecture
You have a data or AI problem that needs solving at scale. Bring your architecture, roadmap, or frustration. We'll diagnose the issue, map a solution, and you'll leave with a concrete action plan.
AI for Startups Advisory
Get practical AI strategy, not hype. I'll show you exactly where AI creates leverage in your product. You'll leave knowing which features to build first and which to skip.
Startup & Founder Coaching
Building a company is hard. Building one as an immigrant, with financial pressure and family expectations, is harder. I've lived it. I'll help you navigate what you're facing right now.
Unsure which session matches your needs? Read my articles on AI career paths and data engineering strategy . Then book a call when you're ready.
Or just reach outArticles on AI, Data & Career Growth
Building Toya: What I Learned Shipping My First Fintech Product
What I learned building Toya, a personal finance app born from $140,000 in personal debt, including the things I would do differently and the moments that almost made me quit.
Building Your First Agentic System: What Nobody Tells You Before You Start
The real challenges of building multi-step AI agents, from tool use to error handling to latency, and why most first attempts break exactly where the demos look flawless.
Agentic AI: What It Actually Means and Why Most Implementations Miss the Point
The term "agentic AI" is everywhere right now. Here is what it actually means, where current implementations fall short, and what it takes to build agents that work reliably in production.
RAG vs Fine-Tuning: How to Actually Decide
A decision framework for when to use retrieval vs. when to actually train, from someone who has built both in production at enterprise scale.
The journey so far
Work Experience
Senior Cloud Solution Architect
Microsoft
Sep 2022 – Present
United States
I lead AI strategy for enterprise customers, partnering with C-level executives to define high-value use cases and ship them to production. I build chatbots, research agents, and image-analysis tools with OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, and LangChain that enterprise customers run in production. I also wrote technical guidance that Microsoft field teams adopted company-wide.
Staff Data Engineer
Press Ganey Associates
Nov 2021 – Aug 2022
United States
I led Data and AI integration for healthcare clients, building pipelines that cut time-to-insight by 40%. I managed the Azure infrastructure and Databricks workflows powering analytics across multiple clinical and operations teams.
Azure Data Engineer
Lululemon
Sep 2020 – Oct 2021
United States
I built a personalized recommendations model that lifted sales conversions by 12%. I designed the data pipelines behind it and containerized our ML workflows with Docker and Kubernetes to get them into production faster.
Technical Architect
Neal Analytics LLC
Dec 2017 – Aug 2020
United States
I was the pre-sales Data/AI architect for enterprise clients, scoping solutions that closed multi-million-dollar deals. I designed end-to-end data and AI systems for those engagements and mentored engineering teams to ship faster through DevOps automation.
Big Data Developer
KloudData Labs
Earlier
India
I worked on healthcare AI use cases and data migrations, designing Hadoop pipelines and tuning performance across enterprise data environments.
Education
Quantic School of Business and Technology
Executive MBA
2024
Focused on technology entrepreneurship, product strategy, and business innovation. Applied MBA concepts directly to building and scaling tech ventures.
Jagannath University
Bachelor of Computer Science
2016
Foundation in computer science, algorithms, and software engineering.
Built to build
I've shipped AI and data systems for 10+ years across enterprise, startup, and cloud environments. I master the full stack, from raw data ingestion to production AI deployment.
AI & Machine Learning
End-to-end AI application development, from prompt engineering to production agentic systems.
Data Engineering
Scalable pipeline design, lakehouse architecture, and real-time data systems at enterprise scale.
Cloud & Infrastructure
Certified across the three major cloud platforms with deep Azure expertise.
Languages & Frameworks
Core programming languages and frameworks used day-to-day to build and ship.
Certifications
Solutions Architect Expert
Microsoft
Azure Developer, Data Engineer, Administrator, DevOps
Microsoft
Designing and Implementing a Microsoft Azure AI Solution
Microsoft
Solutions Architect – Professional
AWS
Snowflake Certified Associate
Snowflake
Let's work
together
Whether you're an engineer scaling a data platform, a founder figuring out where AI fits in your product, or building under real pressure as an immigrant, I'll give you direct, practical guidance. No fluff.
Book on TopmateWho I work with
- Data engineers navigating career growth
- Startup founders who need AI strategy
- Immigrant entrepreneurs building under pressure
- Tech leaders designing data platforms
Response time
Usually within 24 hours
Questions people ask me
What does Anishek Kamal do?
I build AI products and advise AI startups on strategy and architecture. I'm the founder of Toya, a financial clarity app, with a few more in progress. I've spent 10+ years shipping production AI and data systems at enterprise scale, currently as a Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft. I also mentor engineers moving into data and AI.
Who do you work with on mentorship and advisory calls?
Data engineers navigating career growth, startup founders figuring out where AI fits in their product, immigrant entrepreneurs building under financial and visa pressure, and tech leaders designing data platforms at scale. Book a session on Topmate.
What AI and data engineering tools do you work with?
I build on Azure AI Foundry, OpenAI, LangChain, LangGraph, Databricks, and Apache Spark. I ship RAG pipelines, agentic AI systems, and scalable data platforms. I hold Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert, AWS Solutions Architect Professional, and Snowflake certifications.
How do I break into data engineering or AI in 2025?
Start with SQL fundamentals, then add Python, dbt, one cloud platform (Azure or AWS), and orchestration with Airflow or Dagster. Ship a real project, like a pipeline that pulls from a public API, transforms with dbt, and loads to a warehouse, and put it on GitHub. Hiring managers care about projects, not courses.
Should I use RAG or fine-tuning for my AI application?
Use RAG when the knowledge changes frequently, you need source citations, or your corpus is large and heterogeneous. Use fine-tuning when you need consistent style or format across thousands of outputs, latency is critical, or your task is highly specialized. They're not in competition. Many production systems combine both.
How can I book a session with Anishek?
All sessions are booked through Topmate at topmate.io/anishekkamal. Available formats: 1:1 career mentorship (30 min), data & AI architecture review (60 min), AI for startups advisory (45 min), and startup & founder coaching (30 min). Response time is typically within 24 hours.
Still have questions? Book a session.
Get in touch
Have a data or AI project in mind? Want to collaborate, or just want to connect? Email me or message me on LinkedIn. I respond within 24 hours.