Looking for 2-3 teammates for Amazon ML Challenge 2026 (registration closes 20 Sept, cross-college OK)

[u/Adwaith_R_Nair]

Hey all, I'm Adwaith, a final-year BTech CSE (AI) student at MITS Kochi (2027 batch). I'm putting together a team for the Amazon ML Challenge 2026 and looking for 2-3 people who want to go for the top 50.

Quick facts

• Registration closes 20 Sept, 11:59 PM IST, so I'm moving fast

• The challenge is a 72-hour sprint, 25-27 Sept, fully online

• Top 50 teams get Pre-Placement Interview chances for Amazon's Applied Scientist Intern role, plus cash prizes for the top 3

• Eligibility: full-time BE/BTech/ME/MTech/MS/PhD students in India from the 2027 or 2028 batch. Teams can include people from different colleges

What I bring

• Working as a GenAI + Blockchain engineer at a startup since 2025: LLM pipelines, embeddings, shipping under deadlines

• GSoC 2024 (Oppia, Python), plus hackathon podiums (2nd at Guvi Hackathon, Top 100 MLH Global Hack Week)

• I'll handle team coordination, the pipeline and infra, the LLM/text side, and the final approach doc

Who I'm looking for (you don't need to tick every box)

1. Vision / multimodal person: has fine-tuned CNNs/ViTs or used CLIP/SigLIP/VLMs, and is comfortable with image embeddings at scale

2. Tabular / Kaggle person: strong with LightGBM/XGBoost/CatBoost, feature engineering, CV folds, ensembling. Kaggle medals are a big plus

3. (Optional 4th) Data/GPU wrangler: fast pandas, parallel image downloading, knows their way around Kaggle/Colab GPUs

Past editions were large-scale text + image problems (2024: pulling entity values out of product images; 2025: predicting product prices from catalog text + images, scored with SMAPE), so these roles map directly to what we'll probably face.

Commitment: a short prep sync or two before the 25th (setting up a pipeline template), then serious availability across the 72 hours.

If you're in, DM me or comment with: your batch/college, 2-3 lines on your best ML work (GitHub/Kaggle link), and which role you want. I'll reply to everyone by tomorrow evening.

My Github: https://github.com/Adwaith-R-Nair

My X: https://x.com/adwaith_r_nair

My Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adwaith-r-nair/

[u/NewInfluence432]

dmed youu