Hello, I'm Monadhika Sharma 👋Your AI doesn't have a model problem. It has a retrieval problem.
For 12 years in Silicon Valley, I worked on search, retrieval and recommendations at Walmart, Pinterest, Roblox and Shopify, most recently training Shopify's commerce foundation models and fine-tuning the LLMs behind Sidekick, Shopify's AI assistant for merchants. Now I run InferSense Labs, where I fix what your search, RAG or AI agent actually retrieves, so it works for real users.
From search ranking to foundation models
I love the problem of helping people find what they're looking for, and I've spent my career on the systems between what someone asks and the result they wanted. I work across the full ML lifecycle: embedding and keyword retrieval, ranking, LLM pre-training and post-training (DAPT, SFT, DPO), and the evaluations that prove it worked.
I built relevance for Walmart.com and the first Walmart Grocery search engine, was a search-quality tech lead at Pinterest, and led search and recommendations at Roblox. At Vantage Discovery I led the ML team, building an LLM-powered search engine that combined semantic understanding with keyword precision, through Vantage's acquisition by Shopify, then worked on Shopify's new search engine, built after the acquisition. I then joined the Foundation Models team in Shopify's Search org and built commerce foundation models, and worked across the stack behind Sidekick, Shopify's AI assistant for merchants, mainly fine-tuning the LLMs that power it.
In July 2026 I left Shopify to found InferSense Labs. Now I help teams whose AI has a retrieval problem, not a model problem, mostly through fixed-scope projects, with ongoing advisory after.
InferSense Labs
My consultancy for teams building search, RAG and domain-tuned LLMs. Every engagement is with me directly: usually a fixed-scope project first, then advisory if it helps.
Search relevance & ranking
The work I did at Walmart, Pinterest and Roblox: getting the right results to the top.
Learn more →RAG & retrieval
Making AI assistants find the answer that's already in your documents.
Learn more →LLM pre-training & fine-tuning
What I did on Shopify's Foundation Models team: models that know your domain.
Learn more →AI & search evaluation
Metrics and LLM judges that show whether a change actually helped.
Learn more →Hire me on contract
- Search relevance engineer
- E-commerce search consultant
- RAG & retrieval engineer
- LLM fine-tuning engineer
- Elasticsearch & OpenSearch relevance
- Search relevance audit
Starting prices for audits, contract engineering and advisory: see pricing →
Services, engagement models and how I work are all on infersense-labs.ai.
Latest writing: Why embeddings don't work for your search: 7 failure modes and how to fix them
Where I've built
- 2026 – now
Founder · InferSense Labs
Consulting on search, RAG, LLM training and evaluation.
- 2025 – 2026
Staff ML Engineer, Foundation Models · Shopify
Built commerce foundation models (DAPT, SFT, DPO) in Shopify's Search org, and worked across the Sidekick stack, mainly fine-tuning its LLMs.
- 2024 – 2025
Led the ML team · Vantage Discovery (acquired by Shopify)
An LLM-powered search engine combining semantic understanding with keyword precision; after the acquisition, worked on Shopify's new search engine.
- 2022 – 2024
Principal Engineer, Search & Recs · Roblox
Led search, discovery and recommendations: retrieval, ranking and ML.
- 2016 – 2022
Search Quality Tech Lead · Pinterest
Search relevance and ranking for Pinterest search.
- 2014 – 2016
Search Relevance Engineer · Walmart Labs
Relevance for Walmart.com and the first Walmart Grocery search engine.
I'd love to hear what you're building
Fine-tuning a model for your domain, fixing search relevance, or trying to prove an AI feature works? Tell me about it. You'll talk with me directly, not a sales team, and there's no pressure: if I'm not the right fit, I'll say so and suggest who might be.