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Jithin James

Jithin James

ML engineer & open‑source maintainer building RAG / LLM tooling

jjmachan
San Francisco, California, United States
India
Joined December 2024
Favicon imagejjmachan.in
Favicon imagegithub.com
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Favicon imageragas.io
Favicon imageexplodinggradients.com

Network

3.8K connections

Summary

Open‑source maintainer and builder of RAG/LLM evaluation tooling: Jithin is the co‑founder and chief maintainer behind Exploding Gradients’ Ragas project — an opinionated, research‑informed toolkit for evaluating Retrieval‑Augmented Generation. Ragas provides objective metrics, synthetic test generation, monitoring, and many integrations, and has an active community and GitHub presence. github+2
Startup founder & YC participant: Jithin co‑founded the company behind Ragas and participated in Y Combinator W24 (Winter 2024), focusing the company on building evaluation and testing infrastructure for LLM applications used by engineering teams and enterprises. ycombinator+1
Practical ML engineering and deployment experience: Prior to Ragas, Jithin worked as an ML Engineer at BentoML where he contributed to model packaging and deployment tooling (bentoctl, Yatai) and authored practical guides explaining how to productionize models (e.g., FastAI + BentoML). bentoml+1
Research & evaluation mindset: Jithin has co‑authored/been associated with research on RAG evaluation (the Ragas arXiv paper) and has combined engineering with research to produce tooling that implements objective, reference‑free evaluation metrics for RAG pipelines. arxiv+1
Community educator and speaker: He has participated in MLOps community events, given talks and demos (e.g., Ragas demo, open‑source playbook) and contributes to developer education through blog posts and workshops. jjmachan+1

Work

Education

Projects

Writing

Productionizing Fastai Models with BentoML

April 1, 2023

A practical walkthrough of packaging and deploying FastAI models using BentoML, including examples and BentoService patterns for shipping models as APIs.

Favicon imagebentoml.com

Exploding Gradients blog (founding / mission posts)

March 1, 2023

Founding and mission posts about Exploding Gradients and engineering notes on RAG/LLM evaluation published on the Exploding Gradients blog.

Favicon imageexplodinggradients.com

Ragas: Automated Evaluation of Retrieval Augmented Generation

January 1, 2023

ArXiv paper describing Ragas (Retrieval Augmented Generation Assessment), a suite of reference‑free metrics and methods to evaluate retrieval + generation pipelines, enabling faster evaluation cycles without relying heavily on human annotations.

Favicon imagearxiv.org

Hobbies

Motorbiking, travel and photography jjmachan

Notes

MAMohd Atif Siddiqusaid
JJJithin James
is especially open to building new professional connections.

Jan 26, 2026

NKNirant Ksaid that if they were assembling an early-stage team,
JJJithin James
would be one of their top choices.

Jan 26, 2026