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Joseph Lord

@josephlord

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AI/ML engineer translating cutting-edge research into scalable production systems.

United States

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What I'm looking for

I seek senior AI/ML roles building production-grade, scalable AI systems that bridge research and product, with collaborative teams, strong engineering practices, and real business impact.

I am an AI/ML engineer with over 10 years designing, deploying, and scaling AI solutions across e-commerce, enterprise SaaS, edtech, and customer support domains. I specialize in bridging research innovation and business impact through end-to-end system design.

I've built large-scale NLP assistants, conversational AI agents, recommendation systems, and computer vision analytics pipelines, and have experience integrating LLMs and retrieval-augmented generation into production products. I routinely work across data pipelines, model development, and cloud infrastructure.

My career highlights include developing a RAG platform with FAISS and LangChain, creating a GPT-powered conversational tutor that served thousands of concurrent queries, and delivering low-latency conversational systems for financial institutions with strict security and performance requirements. I focus on measurable outcomes such as reduced latency, cost savings, increased engagement, and operational improvements.

I bring deep expertise in deep learning, LLMs, NLP, computer vision, and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), and a pragmatic, product-first approach to AI engineering—partnering with clients and stakeholders to deliver reliable, secure, and impactful systems.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior AI/ML Engineer

Current

Contextual AI

Feb 2024 - Present (2 years 4 months)

Designed and deployed a multi-tenant RAG platform and computer vision analytics system, reducing reference latency and cloud costs while enabling enterprise compliance Q&A and store operations optimization.

PyTorch Faiss fastAPI Docker Kubernetes OpenCV React

Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Western Governors University

Jul 2021 - Dec 2023 (2 years 5 months)

Built a GPT-powered conversational tutor and predictive student risk models, serving thousands of concurrent queries at <200ms latency and achieving ~80% precision in early risk detection.

fastAPI PostgreSQL Elasticsearch AWS Sagemaker Terraform CI CD

Machine Learning Engineer

Kasisto

Oct 2018 - Jun 2021 (2 years 8 months)

Developed and deployed low-latency conversational AI for banking, optimizing intent recognition, slot filling, and voice integrations to meet <150ms response SLAs and compliance requirements.

TensorFlow PyTorch NLP ASR TTS Flask PostgreSQL Docker Kubernetes Security

Machine Learning Engineer

NarrativeDx

Jul 2015 - Aug 2018 (3 years 1 month)

Built NLP pipelines and classifiers for patient feedback analysis, reducing manual triage workload by ~50% and enabling real-time alerts for high-severity issues.

Python scikit learn TensorFlow NLP Flask PostgreSQL AWS Docker

AI Research Engineer

BairesDev

Aug 2013 - Jun 2015 (1 year 10 months)

Prototyped hybrid recommendation systems and applied CNNs for defect detection, achieving up to 95% detection accuracy in factory pilots.

Recommendation Systems TensorFlow Caffe OpenCV Python Flask AWS PostgreSQL

AI Intern

Pinewood Analytics

Aug 2012 - Jul 2013 (11 months)

Developed regression and classification models to improve sales forecasting and integrated predictions into dashboards and Flask APIs for real-time decisioning.

Python Flask Tableau SQL Classification

Education

Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework

Rice University

Master of Science, Computer Science

2012 - 2013

Completed a Master of Science in Computer Science with a focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning, emphasizing advanced ML techniques and research-led projects.