Tirumala Kaggundi
Policy, research & code.
I am a civil servant (Indian Trade Service - 2009) with the Government of India, where I specialize in international trade policy. I work on AI and data science projects in my free time, and write about them on this site and on Substack at indianwesterlies.substack.com. I am based out of New Delhi and share my home with my spouse and two teenaged daughters.
ABOUT
I have spent over a decade and a half in the Indian Trade Service working on trade policy, export promotion, and economic diplomacy. Prior to joining the government, I worked with the private sector - across Wipro, Infosys, Eaton, Goodrich and Airbus specializing in hydraulics, modeling and simulation for flight system hydraulics, and engineering product development. Since my Masters in Computational Analysis and Public policy at the University of Chicago in 2022, I have taken a liking to independent research in quantitative analysis, data science, and writing for public audiences, while building small projects in Python and JavaScript to test interesting concepts. One such effort won me a second place in the global "AI for trade" competition in 2025/26.
This site is a simple home for my work — selected projects, writing, and a current resume. Thank you for visiting!
FEATURED PROJECTS
All projects →AI for Trade Global Competition – Trade Forecasting
2nd place in the global AI for Trade competition (Center for Collective Learning, Prof. César Hidalgo). Built a traditional ML pipeline to forecast future trade volumes for HS6 product lines (aggregated to HS4 level) and achieved the best sMAPE score among entries.
Algo Trading Framework
Production-ready Python framework for end-of-day positional backtesting on Indian equities and futures. Built with vectorbt, SQLite logging, and YAML-driven configuration.
NSE Options Data Archive
Pipeline for ingesting, normalizing, and analyzing historical options data from NSE. Includes research notebooks and data manifests for alpha exploration.
OpenAI API Experiments
Small Flask + Python demo apps exploring the OpenAI API, including chat-style interfaces and structured output experiments.
WRITING
All publications →Resume
Indian Trade Service (2009) • Policy & Research