Adrian Hayden — Software Engineer
I build LLM inference, agent tooling, and the systems under them.
Most of my work has the same shape: take something that only runs when a specific person is watching it, and turn it into something that runs unattended, records what it did, and can be checked by someone else later.
- Based
- Austin, TX
- Working
- Remote / hybrid
- Now
- LLM inference & agent tooling
- Degree
- B.S. SWE, Sep 2026
01 / Selected work
Systems that had to keep running
Five projects, described the way I would describe them in review: what the system is, what I was responsible for, and what actually came out of it.
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Single-GPU LLM Serving Optimization
Serving a 27B model at long context on one consumer GPU, and finding the throughput that the stock kernels leave on the table.
- System
- SGLang serving Qwen3.8-27B (NVFP4) on one RTX 5090: FP8 GEMM dispatch, a fused FP4 activation kernel, NVFP4 autotuning, and a quantized speculative draft model.
- Responsibility
- Sole owner: kernel work, profiling, draft and checkpoint selection, and the benchmarks behind every number below.
- Proof
- Throughput up 36% from kernel work; 145 tok/s sustained (+59%) at a 216K-token context. NVFP4 GEMM latency cut 30% (72.9 → 51.1 µs). Extended to 256K context at 131.5 tok/s decode, and 103 aggregate tok/s across four concurrent requests (from 74).
-
Wispr Agent CLI & Evaluation Harness
A Go CLI that gives coding agents bounded, structured access to local meeting summaries, search, and timestamped transcript evidence — so an agent can cite what was actually said without ever getting free rein over the database.
- System
- Read-only SQLite access, deterministic ID resolution, bounded pagination, structured JSON envelopes, speaker resolution, and explicit untrusted-content boundaries.
- Responsibility
- Sole owner — design, implementation, the agent-integration skill that defines safe usage patterns, and the evaluation harness.
- Proof
- Cross-model evaluation over 10 behavioral cases scoring correctness, tool use, latency, tokens, and cost. Findings drove search and agent-guidance changes; all 20 targeted reruns stayed correct and met their per-case tool-call budgets.
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Klinebot Production Automation Daemon
A Go daemon running unattended against live exchange and blockchain APIs. The hard part was never the integration — it was making the thing fail safely when the network, the clock, or the operator does something unexpected.
- System
- SQLite persistence, deterministic scheduling, live execution, event logging, health and NTP checks, separated fund-control and limited execution keys, and pause/resume safeguards.
- Responsibility
- Led design and implementation, including application scaffolding and production code, then shipped static binaries and Docker images for AWS VPS deployment.
- Proof
- Every client who received it deployed it. It ran roughly three months in production with no significant incidents reported.
Client work — architecture and outcomes only.
-
Reproducible Research Data Package
Roughly 20 GB of compressed historical data, packaged so that somebody else can re-run the analysis and get the same answer.
- System
- Zstandard-compressed Parquet, DuckDB query recipes, provenance tracking, quality validation, and explicit coverage semantics.
- Responsibility
- Built the package and its client-facing technical materials, and was selected to lead interactive instruction on it.
- Proof
- Shipped as a reproducible analysis workflow rather than a data dump — sources, validation checks, and coverage limits are all inspectable by the reader.
-
High-Availability K3s Compute Cluster
A mixed-hardware K3s cluster I run so that agent and automation workloads have somewhere isolated, persistent, and cheap to live.
- System
- Multi-node K3s across heterogeneous machines — 50+ CPU cores and 400+ GB aggregate memory — with GPU scheduling, NAS-backed shared storage, and redundant nodes for workload continuity.
- Responsibility
- Built and operate it: Ansible provisioning, Grafana monitoring, custom CI/CD runners, storage, scheduling, upgrades, and recovery.
- Proof
- Runs isolated containerized coding-agent and automation workloads daily. Capacity figures are deliberately conservative.
02 / Experience
Building it, then teaching it
-
Jan 2024 —
PresentIndependent ML Research & Infrastructure
Self-directed · Austin, TX
LLM inference optimization on my own GPU cluster, custom CUDA kernels, and model fine-tuning: a 7B decompilation model that emits byte-exact functions on the first attempt over 60% of the time, trained on synthetic-data pipelines, and now a sub-1B model trained from scratch.
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Nov 2025 —
Nov 2026Software Engineer & Technical Instructor
HyperTrend · Remote
Owned client delivery for AI tools and data workflows, from requirements and implementation through documentation and handoff. Designed a 52-week technical curriculum and delivered an original one-hour workshop every week to 25–50 clients and internal staff, plus one-on-one implementation consultations.
-
Jun —
Aug 2024Financial Research Intern
Lunar Capital · Remote
Conducted financial-model research for a third-party client and built applications supporting trading automation and wallet-key workflows on a four-person team.
- ML & inference
- SGLang · vLLM · CUDA · PyTorch · Hugging Face · NCCL · Nsight · Fine-tuning
- Languages
- Python · Go · C++ · Rust · TypeScript · SQL · Bash
- AI & agents
- Agent tooling · Model evaluation · Evaluation harnesses · Workflow automation
- Data
- SQLite · PostgreSQL · DuckDB · Parquet · Pipelines
- Systems
- AWS · Linux · Kubernetes / K3s · Docker · Ansible · Grafana · NVIDIA GPU clusters · Git
- Education
- B.S. Software Engineering, Western Governors University — Sep 2026 · A.S., Trident Technical College — 2022
03 / About
How I work
I started in support and research, moved into building the systems I had been troubleshooting, and now spend most of my time on LLM inference, agent tooling, and the infrastructure around both.
The through-line is inspectability. A tool that produces the right answer but can't show its work is a tool you have to babysit forever. So I care a lot about the unglamorous parts — deterministic identifiers, structured errors, provenance, bounded permissions, honest coverage limits, evaluations that can actually fail.
The teaching half isn't separate from that. Designing a 52-week curriculum and standing up in front of 25–50 people every week enforces the same discipline as writing a CLI: if the interface needs a footnote, the interface is wrong.
I finished a B.S. in Software Engineering in September 2026 and am looking for remote or Austin-based work in ML infrastructure, inference, applied AI, and agent tooling.
04 / Contact
Get in touch
Email is the fastest way to reach me. I read everything that isn't a template.