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. Markets and finance are a whole other rabbit hole I never really climbed out of.

I feel grateful 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.

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.