Systems and methods are provided for selecting an optimized data model architecture subject to resource constraints. One or more resource constraints for target deployment are identified, and random model architectures are generated from a set of model architecture production rules subject to the one or more resource constraints. Each random model architecture is defined by randomly chosen values for one or more meta parameters and one or more layer parameters. One or more of the random model architectures are adaptively refined to improve performance relative to a metric, and the refined model architecture with the best performance relative to the metric is selected.