Karun Thankachan is a Senior Data Scientist who specializes in Recommender Systems and Information Retrieval. Over the years, he has worked across multiple industries such as e-commerce, fintech, PXT, and edtech. Currently, he is part of the Walmart e-Commerce team, where he helps improve item selection and availability using machine learning. Outside of work, Karun is active in the data science community – as a mentor, speaker, and content creator. In this exclusive interview, Karun shares insights from his journey, how he broke into data science, lessons from scaling systems at top companies, and his advice for those navigating the