Résumé

Cliff Chandler

cliffplaysdrums@gmail.com github.com/cliffplaysdrums linkedin.com/in/cliff-chandler

Ten years building software and solving difficult technical problems. Motivated by curiosity, quick to learn new domains, and committed to honest, thoughtful communication.

Selected work, explained at length → selected work

Experience

Crunchbase Oct 2023 — present

Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Build AI-powered systems integrating LLMs with internal data, web crawling infrastructure, and external search tools through agentic workflows, structured tool orchestration, and persistent state management. These systems include Scout, the customer-facing chatbot live on crunchbase.com, and a distributed prediction and insight generation platform operating at scale.

Develop evaluation and data quality tooling to trace prediction pipelines and assess output quality.

Contribute across architecture, backend infrastructure, AI workflow design, observability, and data platforms.

Plainsight Feb 2022 — Aug 2023

Machine Learning Engineer

Developed dynamic cloud pipelines for data ingestion and ML operations on large data sources. Built a company data layer that let multiple products share those sources instead of each keeping its own copy. Created the CI/CD workflows.

Stack · Ubuntu · Python · PyTorch · gRPC · FastAPI · PostgreSQL · SQLAlchemy · ClickHouse · Redis · Apache Beam · Dataflow · GCS · Pub/Sub

General Motors Apr 2021 — Feb 2022

Senior Software Engineer, AI/ML

Built maps for autonomous vehicles on high-performance computing platforms. Contributed to architecture decisions, primarily on performance and quality.

Stack · Python · PyTorch · PySpark · Dask · pandas · HPC clusters

LTN Global Jan 2017 — Apr 2021

Software Engineer

Worked directly with customers to understand their systems, often onsite — their constraints were the job, not an obstacle. Built and maintained core application device drivers and proprietary libraries in C++ and JavaScript to run on Linux. Integrated Kafka, Node.js, and other open-source technologies into a proprietary platform. Automated tests with MochaJS. Performed Linux system administration duties daily.

Stack · C++ · JavaScript · Linux · Kafka · Node.js · MochaJS · SQL · PHP · Python · bash

Georgia State University Aug 2016 — Dec 2016

Undergraduate Teaching Assistant

Held office hours to assist undergraduate students across a breadth of computer science topics. Graded assignments and exams, and helped maintain the course website.

U.S. Navy Nov 2009 — Aug 2015

Arabic Linguist

2011 — 2013 · Arabic language training
Jan 2013 — Dec 2014 · Geolocation Operator, NSA
Dec 2014 — Aug 2015 · Mission Manager, NSA

Education

M.S. Computer Science, Machine Learning

Georgia Institute of Technology
May 2021

B.S. Computer Science

Georgia State University
Dec 2016

Projects

Cassava Leaf Disease Classification

Personal project · Winter 2020 — 2021

A Kaggle challenge to identify, from a photograph of cassava leaves, which of four diseases is afflicting the plant or whether it is healthy. Training data was over 21,000 images crowd-sourced from farmers — heavily imbalanced and extremely noisy. Using PyTorch, I performed image augmentation and used a 50-layer residual network to reach over 70% accuracy on the test set, an 8.5% improvement over predicting the most frequent label.

Predicting HDI

Georgia Institute of Technology · Fall 2018

A team effort on a UNICEF challenge to predict Human Development Index from country-specific data. I contributed ETL in Python and pandas over several large CSV files, aggregating related data and generating new data points by mapping independent but correlated sources — a 30x speed-up over naive iteration. I also contributed the loading and scaling of that data in D3 and Django.

AIGO

Georgia State University · Fall 2016

A group project in MATLAB implementing an agent to play Go. For the game itself I contributed the recursive logic that efficiently determines when pieces are captured. For the agent I built a neural network from scratch, along with a genetic algorithm.

Autonomous Rover

Personal project · Summer 2016

Connected an Arduino Uno, a motorshield, and a sonar to a Snap Circuits rover, then programmed it to drive autonomously while avoiding objects.