Professional Experience

Senior Software Engineer | Spice AI | July 2023-Present

I focus on the AI building blocks & infrastructure for the Spice platform.

Think: training pipelines, inference (server & on the edge), understanding the industry & technical SOTA time-series ML, and designing an intuitive & powerful developer experience.

When I joined, I also worked on a bunch of things, such as: JIT price prediction models for Web3, improving our ETL & datalake architecture for our price HTAP system, improving the developer experience of and making public releases of our SDK and publicly available datasets.

Ramping up on Rust for some important new changes to Spice.AI offerings

Engineering Lead | Marqo | Oct 2022-July 2023 (10 mos)

  • Directed and led the maturation of cloud infrastructure and processes (containerization, testing, CI/CD, and development tooling) for a small team of 4-5 engineers.
  • Designed and built the Marqo Cloud control plane, responsible for managing and provisioning the cell-based architecture used in the data plane for reliability and horizontal scaling, as well as automatic provisioning and scaling during account onboarding. The control plane handled a mix of container, Kubernetes, and AWS IaC integrations.
  • Designed and built distributed training and fine-tuning infrastructure for LLMs in use to improve search relevancy.
  • Within my first week, I unblocked the onboarding of our first Marqo Cloud customer by leading the deployment and performance testing of our storage layer on highly available Kubernetes clusters.
  • Improved the system design of Marqo Cloud to meet vertical scaling requirements essential for winning enterprise customers.
  • Redesigned and reimplemented core data plane microservices from Python for performance reasons.

Software Engineer | Amazon | Mar 2021-Oct 2022 (1 yr 8 mos)

  • Worked on Amazon Grocery’s data and recommendation systems for substitutions/replacements.

  • Diagnosed and fixed the event streaming, ETL and statistical model pipeline responsible for grocery substitution recommendations leading to a $80MM revenue recovery. Became the SME in this area and proposed new approaches to improve content-based filtering for new or out-of-distributions SKUs.

  • Built out CI/CD and infrastructure code for opensearch clusters to safely deploy our observability platform and make changes to the system. Systemised telemetry agents to reduce code duplication and errors. Reduced telemetry bloat and improved infrastructure configuration saving 30% on cloud costs. Introduced distributed tracing across substitution-based microservices for improved observability.

  • Delivered paid substitutions across Amazon Fresh stores as a part of a multi-team/organisation. Responsible for leading work on away team systems. Designed and delivered improved systems to simplify the service architecture across grocery fullfilment systems.

  • Delivered production systems to enable CCPA and GDPR compliance across grocery substitution data.

AI & Data Engineer | MaxwellPlus | Apr 2018-Mar 2021 (3 yrs)

  • Automated and deployed AI training infrastructure using Kubernetes and other containerisation tooling across both Google Cloud and AWS.◦
  • Responsible for internal and production infrastructure, release automation and site reliability across the product within multiple environments that require medical regulatory compliance.◦
  • Improved CI/CD tooling for developer efficiency including browser testing, build times and system tooling.
  • Implemented batch and distributed data pipelines for processing DICOMs with Apache Beam Google Dataflow.
  • Researched and developed deep learning models in Tensorflow for MRI bias correction, modality transfer learning prostate cancer classification including reviewing and experimentally assessing new literature.
  • Developed features for Django backend including multi-factor authentication and automated HL7 integration
  • Developed features for React.js frontend applications including dynamically generated questionnaires

Junior Programmer | UQ Queensland Brain Institute | Mar 2017-Apr 2018 (1 yr 2 mos)

  • Developed projects, scripts, and applications for QBI researchers
  • Worked on image analysis, automation, complexity analysis, and web development

Intern | Defence Australia | Nov 2017-Feb 2018 (4 mos)

  • Developed Python and C# solutions for network security assessment

Winter Research Scholar | The University of Queensland | Jun 2017-Jul 2017 (2 mos)

  • Computationally modeled Rho signaling effects during mass cell migration using MATLAB

Software Intern | NetEngine | Nov 2016-Mar 2017 (5 mos)

  • Primarily worked on Rails-based software applications

Education

Bachelor’s Degree in Software Engineering/Mathematics | The University of Queensland | 2016-2020

  • GPA: 6.88
  • Research: Honours thesis in Bayesian deep learning on longitudinal medical data for cancer prognosis
  • Hawken Scholar: Received every semester. Awarded to engineering students in the top 5% of the cohort.
  • Exchange Scholarship: Studied pure mathematics and computer science at the University of Waterloo
  • New Colombo Scholarship: Studied the intersection of technology and entrepreneurship in Dalian, China.
  • Extracurricular: Active member of UQ computing society, UQ social running club, engineering and electrically based engineering student societies, EUS and EBESS respectively