Other information
I'm a New Zealand citizen relocating to Sydney.
I'm a builder before anything else, most interested in early-stage teams solving genuinely hard problems where the AI has to actually work. Happy to talk about full-time or fractional depending on the stage.
Able to work in Australia without visa sponsorship
Requires visa sponsorship to work in Australia
Work experience
Proudest professional achievement
I took a real-time multimodal AI system from a whiteboard idea to something running in production for accuracy-critical use, and held it there. The pipeline goes text and speech in to a live animated avatar out at ~10s latency, and I wrote the core of it myself: the neural machine translation and controlled-generation layer, a custom intermediate representation, a hybrid retrieval layer grounding output against a structured knowledge base, and the real-time 3D runtime. Along the way I cut animation production from ~1 month per minute of content to 2-3 days and hit near-100% human-rated acceptability in critical domains within tight latency and cost budgets. I'm lead inventor on a granted patent (US, UK, AU) covering the method. What I'm proudest of is that it survived contact with real users, not just demos.
Co-founder and CTO
Early-stage AI startup • 2017 - Present
For 8 years I've architected and personally built a real-time multimodal AI platform end-to-end: text and speech in, a live animated avatar out, at ~10s latency and held to production-grade correctness rather than demo-grade. I write across the whole stack: the neural machine translation and controlled-generation layer, a custom intermediate representation and notation framework for consistent output across domains, a hybrid retrieval layer (embedding-based vector search, a semantic knowledge graph, and LLM-based context retrieval) grounding generation against a structured knowledge base, neural avatar rendering using GANs and custom transformers in PyTorch, the real-time 3D runtime in Unreal Engine (C++), and the event-driven AWS infrastructure underneath it all.
Measurable wins: cut animation production from ~1 month per minute of content to 2-3 days, scaled a structured linguistic database past 12,000 entries, and hit near-100% human-rated translation acceptability in critical domains within tight latency and cost budgets.
I also run the technical side of the business. I've led teams up to 7 across AI/ML, software, graphics, linguistics and infrastructure with zero senior attrition, raised $6M+ across four rounds, secured $1M+ in non-dilutive R&D funding, closed $2M+ in enterprise contracts as the technical face in the room, and led ISO 27001 certification and SOC 2 readiness. I'm lead inventor on a granted patent (US, UK, AU) covering the core method.
Education
MS, Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence), Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023 to 2025. Graduate coursework across NLP, machine learning, reinforcement learning, computer vision, and knowledge-based AI. BE (Hons) Computer Systems Engineering, First Class Honours, plus a conjoint BCom in Finance and Management, University of Auckland, 2014 to 2018
