A little about me.

I’m Manas. I work at Deriv as an Applied AI Engineer, and I sometimes make hip-hop beats on the side as sledg3r. This site is where those two live side by side.

I graduated from BITS Pilani in 2025, joined Deriv as an Applied AI Engineer intern, and came on full-time that August. My work these days revolves around multi-agent systems and agentic tools that actually do work, and it’s also where I love experimenting on my own time. I enjoy getting hands-on with ML algorithms and the kind of big, messy datasets that force you to think. And markets and finance are a bit of an obsession, honestly. I’m usually a few tabs deep into whatever’s moving in the world that week.

I feel lucky to be building through whatever we end up calling this "AI revolution". I’d rather contribute to it than narrate it from the sidelines, and I try to stay close to where things are going: papers, threads, the late-night demos people post at 2am. X is basically my front page for all of it: researchers, builders, AI companies shipping in real time. The pace means my notes app always has more ideas than I can get to, and that’s part of the fun. Most of what I’m currently cooking lands on GitHub.

What I’m into

Specifically hip-hop and rap. I installed FL Studio back in 2013, got nowhere for years, and only started taking it seriously at uni in 2021. Helped that I’d already spent over a decade on the electronic keyboard and grown up on way too much rap, so sampling and melody feel closer to instinct than guesswork. Since then the beats have pulled past a million plays on YouTube, a few hundred have sold on BeatStars, and a bunch have landed with upcoming artists I respect a lot. Still feels slightly unreal.

Outside of all that: playing and watching cricket and chess religiously, anything at the intersection of AI and the wider tech world, and music on in the background most of the day.

How to reach me

Two inboxes, because the work is split:

• Work / AI / general: manas.karra@gmail.com
• Beats / custom production: prodbysledg3r@gmail.com

DMs are open on Instagram. I try to reply to anything thoughtful and ignore the rest.