Welcome ๐Ÿ—ฟ

My general vibe:

  • โ€ขAI power user. Zellij, Pi, Claude, Zed, and too many agent windows open at once.
  • โ€ขInto AI infra, full-stack stuff, and making systems robust enough to just work.
  • โ€ขQuite studious and active.
Portrait of Julian Canales

Lately

Julian walking

Work

AI engineer at Avathon. I own the agent platform behind the conversational AI product, the knowledge graph it reads, and the evaluation that keeps its answers correct.

UT Austin OMSAI

B.S. in CS & Math from UT Austin, now doing the online MS in AI part-time while working full-time. Currently taking AI in Astrophysics.

Gym, tennis & cycling

Usually try to be active 6ร— a week between lifting, tennis lessons, and cycling. Sometimes I go 6/6, other times I'm at 1/6. I play it by ear.

TV & reading

Recently finished Snowfall and Succession โ€” currently watching Shrinking. Book-wise, just read Stoner and How Machines Learn. Always something in rotation.

Work experience

Avathon logo

AI Engineer

Avathon ยท Oct 2025 โ€“ Present

โŒ„

I build the harness agents run inside: the tools they call, the enterprise knowledge graph they read, and the evaluation that keeps them correct โ€” wired together into a multi-tenant platform running in production.

  • Built the knowledge-graph agent behind the Barrick Gold engagement, working directly with client leadership to shape what they valued. It anchored a multi-year enterprise contract now in production.
  • Extracted the company's conversational AI from a product monolith into a standalone multi-tenant agent platform (Django async ASGI, LangGraph, LiteLLM gateway) and shipped it through dev, UAT and production for a Fortune-500 deployment. It's now the company's shared agent layer.
  • Replaced config-trusted persona scoping with authorization enforced against live identity (Keycloak/OIDC), clearing the last blocker to general availability. Added drop-in MCP server support with per-server isolation and forwarded user tokens, so new tool servers go live by configuration with no code and no deploy.
  • Designed and materialized the canonical ontology behind the agent's answers, modeling 28.7M rows of client data into an agent-queryable knowledge graph, plus the operations layer that verifies freshness and correctness and runs dependency-ordered recompute.
  • Own agent quality with no dedicated QA function on the team: built the evaluation and observability stack (Langfuse, per-query cost/latency/token telemetry) and run continuous evals scoring answer correctness and tool-call trajectory across 16 identity-gated personas.
  • Fine-tuned Qwen2.5-14B (QLoRA) for natural-language-to-graph-query translation on 1,232 execution-verified pairs, reaching parity with Claude Sonnet on single-query generation at a fraction of per-query API cost.
  • Built the carrier scoring and tendering engine for the supply-chain product, separating metric computation from decision policy. Drove adoption of DBOS over Celery+Redis for crash recovery and audit trails.
  • Rebuilt and shipped avathon.com in two weeks (Next.js, Sanity CMS) with the VPs of Strategic Sales and Marketing and a peer engineer.
IBM logo

Data Science Intern

IBM ยท May 2023 โ€“ Aug 2023

โŒ„
  • Built and deployed a Flask proof of concept integrating Watson Assistant with Db2, used in the pitch that won the client engagement.
  • Shipped a Dash application on watsonx and Watson Discovery with a custom evaluation API for side-by-side LLM comparison.
  • Owned backend API integration for a React and Flask onboarding MVP on IBM Cloud and OpenShift.
UT Austin Computer Science logo

Undergraduate Researcher โ€” Earthquake Modeling

UT Austin ยท Jan 2024 โ€“ May 2024

โŒ„
  • Re-engineered a legacy Mathematica seismic-response solver into a multithreaded Python pipeline.
  • Processed 29k+ NGA West2 records and ran 64-vCPU GCP sweeps, cutting runtime from roughly 3 years to about 2 weeks.
  • Produced interactive Plotly dashboards and a seminar deck for faculty presentation.

Selected projects

A few things I've built. Click any card for the full story.

More on GitHub
Adaptive DQN agent navigating a roundabout
RLRobustnessModel Eval

Adaptive DQN Planner

Extend a research paper's results using statistical and ML methods learned from an advanced machine learning course.

Open
Fantasy football RL draft board visualization
PythonPyTorchGymnasium

Fantasy Draft RL Agent

Spent a summer trying to teach an RL agent to draft better than me. It didn't.

Open
CUDA K-Means GPU clustering visualization
CUDAC++GPU

CUDA K-Means

Wanted to actually understand GPU programming instead of just nodding along when people say 'parallelize it.'

Open
Crabs AI assistant architecture diagram
OpenClawLightRAGSelf-Hosted

Crabs ๐Ÿฆ€ AI Assistant

Wanted an AI assistant that actually knows what I'm working on โ€” not another ChatGPT wrapper.

Open
Black-Scholes derivation paper screenshot
ProbabilityMeasure TheoryStats

Black-Scholes Derivation Paper

Wanted to actually derive Black-Scholes from scratch instead of just accepting the formula.

Open
GPU fine-grained synchronization benchmark animation
CUDAEM (GMM)Distributed Systems

GPU Fine-Grained Sync for EM (GMM)

Tried to recreate a research paper's fine-grained GPU sync ideas and see if they actually hold up.

Open

Writing

Substack coming soon.

More pics ๐Ÿค 

Julian biking
Cycling
Spending time with dog
Spending time with friends
Travel photo
Traveling a bit

Let's connect

If you want to talk, feel free.

AI infra, product engineering, projects, books, blog stuff, whatever.

View resume