Human-in-the-loop AI
Designing AI systems that support human judgment rather than replace it — especially in healthcare, wellbeing, and other high-trust environments.
Sydney, Australia
Kanishka
Mohaia
AI & Engineering Executive
I build production AI systems that give people more capacity, more context and more confidence — while keeping human judgment at the centre.
Based in Sydney, I work across AI, platform engineering, data, and technology leadership, with a focus on healthcare, wellbeing, responsible AI, and high-growth engineering organisations.
About
AI executive. Engineering leader. Human-centred systems builder.
I am an AI and engineering executive based in Sydney. My work sits at the intersection of production AI, platform engineering, data, and technology leadership — with a focus on systems that operate reliably in high-trust environments.
Today at Sonder, I lead engineering, platform, data, and AI work across healthcare and wellbeing. My focus is building safe, scalable, human-centred AI systems that reduce cognitive load for care teams and help professionals respond with better context, more confidence, and stronger operational guardrails.
Before Sonder, I spent almost eight years at Rokt scaling engineering and production machine learning during a period of significant company growth. I scaled my own organisation to 80–90 engineers across seven teams, established Rokt's first New York machine-learning team, and worked across real-time decisioning, ML infrastructure, experimentation, and global engineering.
Across my career, the through-line has been the same: building technology that works in production, scales with the organisation, and earns trust from the people who depend on it.
Areas of Focus
Where I create the most value.
I work where AI strategy, engineering execution, and organisational leadership meet.
AI ROI & Transformation
Helping organisations move from AI experimentation and adoption to measurable value, operational accountability, and production outcomes.
Engineering Scale
Building lean, high-performing engineering teams with strong ownership, clear standards, and the systems needed to deliver reliably.
Responsible Production AI
Creating production AI systems with evaluation, governance, safety review, operational guardrails, and human oversight built in from the start.
What Drives Me
What drives me.
I care about building AI that is useful, measurable, safe, and deeply connected to the people it is meant to help.
AI that amplifies people
The best AI gives people more capacity, more context, and more confidence. It should reduce cognitive load, improve decision-making, and keep responsibility with humans.
Health and wellbeing
Healthcare and wellbeing are where the stakes make the principle clearest: technology should support care, not automate it away.
Talent and operating discipline
AI capability is not just a tooling problem. It depends on the people you hire, the systems you build, the standards you set, and the way teams make decisions.
Australian technology ecosystem
I care about raising the standard of AI, engineering, product, and data practice in Australia through speaking, mentoring, and practical knowledge sharing.
Selected Experience
15+ years of building production systems.
From early-stage engineering to running technology at an AI-first healthcare platform.
Sonder
VP of AI & Engineering
I lead engineering, platform, data, and AI work across Sonder's healthcare and wellbeing platform, with responsibility for technology strategy, architecture, engineering culture, AI governance, and delivery of production systems in a high-trust environment.
Conceived and led Sonder's AI Copilot for care specialists, including human-in-the-loop workflows, evaluation, safety review, and operational guardrails · Built and shipped production AI capabilities for clinical-adjacent care workflows, focused on reducing cognitive load and helping professionals respond with better context · Rebuilt customer reporting and insights platforms, replacing legacy reporting workflows with scalable, customer-facing analytics capability
Significantly improved engineering output by increasing team ownership, reducing dependencies, introducing AI tooling, and raising the hiring bar · Established shared AI platform capabilities, model governance, and engineering standards across product and platform teams
Rokt
VP of Engineering, AI/ML
I joined Rokt shortly after its US$26M Series B and spent almost eight years there as the company scaled globally. During that time, I grew my own engineering organisation from four engineers to 80–90 people across seven teams, established Rokt's first New York machine-learning team, and hired across Sydney and New York.
Scaled real-time machine learning and decisioning systems from millions to billions of transactions across global digital marketplaces · Built and led teams across ML infrastructure, experimentation, feature platforms, recommendations, and production decisioning
Named inventor on machine-learning patents for contextual prediction and content ranking, including US 11,776,013
Datalicious
Head of Engineering
I led engineering through company growth — data engineering, full-stack product development, DevOps, web analytics, attribution products, and cloud data platforms.
Appen
Software Developer / Senior Engineer
Early-career ML and NLP engineering at Appen, building language and data platforms for global technology clients. I joined before the company's ASX listing in January 2015.
Built NLP, translation, transcription, and voice processing pipelines for major global clients
Contributed to data collection and processing platforms used in production ML workflows
- 15+ yrsin AI, data & engineering leadership
- $26M → $7.2BRokt's valuation during my time there
- 4 → 80–90engineers I scaled my Rokt org to, across 7 teams (Sydney & New York)
- Millions → billionsreal-time ML transactions scaled
- Patentsnamed inventor — ML & contextual prediction (US 11,776,013)
- Human-in-the-loopAI shipped in healthcare and wellbeing
Speaking & Thought Leadership
Practical lessons from production AI, engineering scale, and responsible technology leadership.
I share practical lessons from building AI systems, scaling engineering teams, and leading technology transformation in operating organisations — with a focus on human-in-the-loop AI, responsible production systems, healthcare and wellbeing, AI ROI, data platforms, and engineering leadership.
Guest Speaker
UNSW Engineering Graduation Ceremony
Guest speaker at a University of New South Wales engineering graduation ceremony, sharing career lessons and encouragement with graduating engineering students.
AWS Summit Sydney
Building Scalable AI Systems
Panel discussion on building scalable AI infrastructure, high-performance computing environments, model development pipelines, and production AI systems.
DataEngBytes
RAG or Fine-Tune? Customizing LLMs with LoRA
A technical session exploring when to use retrieval-augmented generation, when to fine-tune, and how LoRA can be used to customise large language models efficiently.
DataEngBytes 2023
Unleashing the Power of Real-Time Machine Learning
A talk on Rokt’s journey building web-scale real-time machine learning systems, and how machine learning helped drive business outcomes.
AWS for Software Companies Podcast
Accelerate Machine Learning
Podcast conversation sharing lessons from developing AI and machine learning teams, platforms, and production systems.
Listen →Industry & Ecosystem Events
Responsible AI & Health Technology
Sessions on responsible AI, governance, and building AI capabilities in healthcare and wellbeing — with a focus on production delivery.
Bring this thinking into the room
I write, speak and advise on the practical realities of building AI systems that work in production — especially where trust, governance, human judgment and measurable value matter.
My focus areas include human-in-the-loop AI, AI ROI, healthcare and wellbeing technology, engineering leadership, data platforms, and responsible production systems.
For speaking, media, advisory or serious collaboration, get in touch.