Machine learning systems engineer · founder
I like to just do things.
I move quickly from idea to working system—from products used by millions to the kernels beneath the models. Architecture, training, inference, production: whatever it takes to make the thing real.
Layer 01 · Generative space
drafted.ai
Trained models to generate floor plans, designed bespoke geometry-processing algorithms, and built infrastructure capable of supporting many concurrent users.
Layer 02 · Inference velocity
avian.io
Worked with NVIDIA to optimize DeepSeek R1 inference, setting the world performance record at the time and outperforming specialized hardware systems.
Built custom expert-selection and routing kernels, custom GEMM kernels, and a new quantization specification engineered to minimize error.
Layer 03 · Latent modalities
espresso.ai
Trained transformer models across unusual modalities—building systems beyond the familiar boundaries of text and image.
Layer 04 · Network scale
forefront.ai
Built the first platform for fine-tuning and deploying models such as GPT-J, pioneering multi-LoRA serving roughly a year before open-source implementations caught up.
Reached $131k monthly peak revenue and built a chat product—with early innovations including chat sharing—that grew to 3 million users.
Layer 05 · Predictive terrain
fion
Developed state-of-the-art wildfire spread prediction models using ViT U-Nets for California and Colorado state wildfire services.
Layer 06 · Foundation
owner.com
The earliest layer: building a company from zero and establishing the product instincts underneath every system that followed.
Maximum depth · Selected builds
Things I’ve
worked on.
quark
A GPU kernel compiler and runtime that lowers typed SSA IR to PTX on NVIDIA and MSL on Apple Silicon, built for efficient world-model inference.
02 · Neural compressioncompress.zip
Bit-exact, integer-only neural compression reference implementations in Rust and Python, with models and tokenizers trained for a corpus.
03 · Data systemshaystackdb
A minimal, durable vector database with binary embeddings, JSON filtering, memory-mapped persistence, and distributed deployment.
I’m interested in ambitious systems at the boundary between research and reality.
carson@poole.ai ↗