A career in three acts · told out of order
Operations Manager at Latent (Alpha OBS LLP). Twelve years, from the edit suite to the operations desk.
Dispatches
Field notes on putting AI to work · evaluations, agent workflows, shipping without a dev team · by Kalpak Kale
Latest ·
A document chatbot for a regulated financial client went from a proof of concept to client beta. What got it there was not the model. It was a weighted evaluation of 21 cases, nine rounds of structured QA, and a daily accuracy report the client ran themselves.
Act I
October 2023 onward.
Scene 01
I keep a sixty-person services firm delivering, and build what nobody else has time to build.
As Operations Manager I sit between the project managers who hold the large accounts and everything else that has to happen for a sixty to seventy person services firm to deliver. I lead AI product development from scoping and architecture through deployment and post-release evaluation, and I act as delivery manager on the smaller client projects across BFSI, telehealth, e-commerce and government work.
Dispatches · recent
What worked, what broke, and the numbers behind it. All dispatches · RSS
A document chatbot for a regulated financial client went from a proof of concept to client beta. What got it there was not the model. It was a weighted evaluation of 21 cases, nine rounds of structured QA, and a daily accuracy report the client ran themselves.
Rolling AI coding tools out to a whole team is not a licensing decision. It is a gateway, a spending policy, an evaluation habit and a set of working rules. Here is how a sixty-person services firm did it, including the 38 tool evaluations that mostly ended in "no".
An operations manager with an agentic coding tool can take a statement of work to a production system, but only with a fixed process. The one I use, with the payment-first design and security defaults that a travel platform forced me to learn.
Act II
Shegaon, 2004. A four-year degree begins.
Scene 02
The degree took eight years. The education happened in the gaps.
I began engineering at Shri Sant Gajanan Maharaj College of Engineering in 2004 and was meant to graduate in 2008. Backlogs meant my final year came in 2010 and the last subject cleared in 2012. I do not hide those four years. They are where the job I do now was formed.
Between exams I sold door to door for an NGO: a month of hearing no from strangers and learning to ask anyway. Then Gayatri Infotech posted me for six months as Resident Engineer at the Bank of Maharashtra's central office in Shivajinagar, Pune. Desktops, network, users who needed things fixed today. I was 24 and did not yet have a degree.
Two things came out of it that no timetable would have given me. I finish what I start, however long it takes. And I learned operations from the inside of a bank before I learned it from a textbook. When I sit at the operations desk now, that is the room I am still in.
Scene 03
It started with film. Cut it, watch it end to end, then ship it.
I started in film. A Certificate in Film and TV Editing from Digital Academy in Mumbai led to a video editor's chair at Indian Magic Eye, cutting corporate films from footage handover to final delivery. Pacing, continuity, quality control before anything went to a client.
Editing taught the habit that has followed me everywhere since: the work is not done until someone has watched it end to end and it holds together.
Scene 04
Localised e-learning imagery for learners in dozens of languages.
At Lionbridge I localised e-learning imagery by language and region, then reassembled every version in the authoring tool and checked it for layout and language accuracy. Detail work at volume, where a single wrong glyph ships to thousands of learners.
Scene 05
Three months at Prime Focus. Then on site at Disney, keeping a media company's systems up.
Prime Focus Technologies moved me from pixels to packets. The first three months were at their Andheri MIDC office. Then they deployed me as Infrastructure Engineer to Disney's Mumbai office, also in Andheri MIDC, to maintain the Prime Focus systems installed at the Disney site.
The role was the same shape as my Bank of Maharashtra posting: my employer's systems, installed in the client's building, kept running by me on site. The difference was the cost of failure. A media company cannot afford downtime, and people needed things fixed today. Preventive maintenance, planned upgrades, Linux troubleshooting over remote access, and walking people through hardware fixes step by step.
This is where hosting, DNS and "why is it down" stopped being someone else's problem, and where I learned to represent one company inside another. Most of my work since has had that shape.
Scene 06
From QA analyst to Head of Projects in six years.
I joined Alpha OBS LLP, the company now known as Latent, as a quality analyst and supervisor, moved into project management, and then took over the projects function as Head of Projects. Web, mobile and e-commerce builds for concurrent clients; deadlines set, progress tracked, issues unblocked during execution rather than at review time, and the client conversations when scope or timelines had to change.
In parallel I worked with Suhrud Consultants on an inventory-module rollout, assessing stock-management operations and finding the ERP data-capture gaps that would have produced wrong stock positions. On weekends for a while I also edited wedding films for clients of my own.
Scene 07
Studied operations while doing it.
Operations is a discipline, so I studied it: a postgraduate diploma and an MBA in operations management, business analytics, and then the Executive Programme in IT Management at IIM Lucknow while working full time. In 2026 I added IIM Mumbai's programme on generative AI for business decision-making, because the tools I was already using deserved a proper theoretical footing.
Act III
2025. The editor, the engineer and the manager meet.
Scene 08
A brief goes in. Working software comes out. No development team assigned.
The biggest change in how I work: I now specify, build and ship working systems with agentic coding tools, taking a brief to deployed software without a development team assigned. Not demos. Production systems with payments, encryption, QA cycles and clients using them daily.
Selected work
Each one is live or in client hands. Names left out on purpose.
01
A traveller needs a different government form for every destination. Nothing may be recorded until the money clears.
6destination workflows live in production
Problem. Travellers need a different government form for every destination, each with its own fields, fees and eligibility rules. Originally scoped for tourist visas, the product now runs as an arrival-card system.
My part. Owned it end to end. A payment-first submission model so an application is only recorded once payment clears, made idempotent across the webhook, the return page and a cron reconciler. PII encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, documents behind short-lived signed URLs, uploads scanned by magic byte. Ran the QA cycle: test, file, fix, deploy, verify, close.
Outcome. Live in production with multiple destination workflows enabled.
02
A wealth-management team needs accurate answers from thousands of documents without stepping outside RBI and SEBI lines.
9structured QA rounds before client beta
Problem. A BFSI and AIF client needed staff to get accurate answers from a large document corpus without breaching RBI and SEBI compliance boundaries.
My part. Proof of concept to demonstrable prototype: rebuilt a React, Flask and FAISS script onto a containerised FastAPI, Celery, Redis, Milvus and PostgreSQL stack behind Traefik with GHCR-based CI. Designed a 21-case weighted evaluation framework covering intent, retrieval and semantic drift, ran nine structured QA rounds, held the client feedback calls and made the beta release call.
Outcome. In client beta with daily accuracy reporting, and a vision-based ingestion path that lifted slide-deck text extraction well above standard OCR.
03
A jewellery manufacturer takes orders as handwritten slips and voice notes. Vendors must never see customer identity or price.
180tracked issues delivered in production
Problem. Orders arrived as handwritten slips and voice notes, and vendors needed design specifications without ever seeing customer identity or pricing.
My part. PHP 8 and MySQL REST backend with a React 19 front end; Claude OCR reading order slips and Whisper transcribing voice notes; a WhatsApp Business webhook for customer and vendor messaging with vendor messages scoped to design specifications only.
Outcome. Live in production with around 180 tracked issues delivered, including the Meta app review.
04
Content, prospecting and reporting were manual, repetitive and easy to let slip.
60prospects and candidates sourced per day
Problem. Content, sourcing and reporting work was manual, repetitive and easy to let slip.
My part. A content pipeline that audits the site, pulls Search Console and analytics issues, researches keywords, drafts an article, emails it for approval, applies the reply revisions, publishes and resubmits to Search Console. Scheduled agents add 50 prospect companies and 10 sourced candidates daily; a weekly cron refreshes a KPI dashboard across three properties.
Outcome. Recurring work runs unattended with a human approval gate where it matters.
Toolkit
Fifteen years, one tool at a time. Each bar is when a capability entered the kit and whether it is still in daily use.
Epilogue
Scene 09
Cadet, trekker, occasional editor.
Before any of this I was a cadet. An NCC "A" Certificate with 11 Maharashtra Battalion in Akola, a National Himalayan Trekking Expedition in 2002, and the National Standard Examination in Physics in 2004. I still travel and trek when I can, still cut the occasional film, and spend a suspicious amount of free time evaluating new AI tooling.
At a glance
Roll credits
Email is the quickest route: kalpak@kalpakkale.com, or connect on LinkedIn. The form below is a draft checker only. To reach me, use the email address.