Hey there! 👋🏼
I’m Vaibhav Kalekar.
AI & Data Governance Automation 🤖 | AI Enablement & Assurance 📈 | Healthcare · Financial Services · Insurance | Based in Sydney | Available Immediately
I started as a QA automation engineer, spending ten years learning to think in terms of what breaks and what a system needs to prove before anyone signs off on it. That instinct has shaped everything since.
Over eighteen years it pulled me deeper, from testing systems and data quality to governing them, embedding data governance frameworks and operating models inside
- HIPAA regulated healthcare firms in the US and India,
- APRA regulated financial services and insurance organisations across Australia, and
- A SaaS platform in Germany. Governance only works when it is built into the pipeline from day one, not bolted on before an audit.
When agentic AI started showing up inside the organisations I worked in, I did not want to write policy for tools I had not used, so I built some myself, hands on work with LangChain, RAG, LangGraph and MLflow that keeps the AI controls I design grounded in how these systems actually behave in production. That led to ISO 42001 AI Lead Implementer certification (Jun 2026), extending my governance discipline into AI risk assessment, model oversight and responsible AI operating models, alongside a CDMP candidacy (DAMA-DMBOK, expected Aug 2026).
I sit at the intersection of governance, controls and automation, and AI enablement, equally at home in a board level risk forum, a governance workshop, or an engineering standup.
What I bring:
▸ Governance Frameworks: CDEs, ownership and stewardship, lineage, metadata, governance forums, embedded from Day 0
▸ AI Governance & Enablement: ISO 42001, AI risk assessment, responsible AI, use case identification, adoption programs, NIST AI RMF/EU AI Act awareness
▸ Assurance & Automation: Automated validation, Anomaly detection, reconciliation controls, model output monitoring and drift detection, audit ready reporting
▸ Regulatory depth: HIPAA, HL7, X12, APRA/CPG 235, Australian Privacy Act, DAMA-DMBOK
▸ Applied AI: agentic workflow design, LangChain, LangGraph, RAG, MLflow, LangFuse
▸ Automation Tools: Cypress, Playwright, Selenium, Robot Framework, Typescript, Python
Most recent engagement:
→ APRA regulated insurer, Sydney (Europ Assistance Australia, part of Generali): designed and automated a validation and monitoring framework that intercepted quality failures before they reached compliance and actuarial reporting, eliminating 8 to 12 hours of manual work per week.
Beyond the day job:
I am also a photographer and writer. I shoot street and architectural scenes, mostly in black and white, on a Fujifilm X-E4, with a body of work spanning the cities I have lived in, Mumbai, Chicago, Munich, and now Sydney. You can see 100+ of my photos on Unsplash at https://unsplash.com/@vaibhavkalekar. I also write short fiction in the sci-fi and dystopian genre alongside personal essays on Technology, Self-Reflection, Philosophy, and Modern Life, published at vaibhavkalekar.com.
Sydney based, Australian PR holder, available immediately. Open to AI governance, AI enablement, Assurance, Agentic Automation, and AI risk/controls roles across financial services, healthcare, insurance, and government.
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