AI Engineer

Desmond Choy

Shipping full-stack AI systems end-to-end. Multi-agent orchestration, cost-optimized LLM pipelines, and real-time WebSocket architectures. Six production applications across education, music, computer vision, and behavioral science.

6 production apps shipped

Published Work

Production applications and research across AI engineering, computer vision, and education technology.

Buttery Smooth Jamming

Real-time multi-agent AI music-jamming band with four persistent LLM agents coordinating over WebSockets.

  • 6.2s p95 latency across all agent responses
  • 100% success rate across 24 directive runs
  • 243 commits, 132 issues tracked, 281 tests
  • 3 architectural versions shipped in 27 days
  • Custom MCP server bridging live coding environment with agent orchestration
Next.jsTypeScriptCodexStrudelMCPWebSockets

Learning Odyssey

AI-native interactive storytelling app for children that weaves educational content into 10-chapter adventures.

  • Multi-model cost routing: narrative via Gemini Flash, formatting via Flash Lite
  • Validate-then-stream: pre-validates AI content before real-time streaming
  • Visual consistency via accumulated character state + two-step image synthesis
FastAPISupabaseGeminiRailwayDockerReactWebSockets

AI-powered PDF study assistant that transforms documents into personalized, adaptive learning notes.

  • Two-phase PDF processing pipeline reducing API costs 70–80%
  • LaTeX/Markdown support with KaTeX math rendering
  • Inline AI commands: elaborate, simplify, analogize
PythonFastAPITypeScriptReactViteGemini 3 Flash

Moodsic

Emotion-aware music recommendation fusing facial expression and scene analysis.

  • Dual-pathway face + scene emotion fusion with variance weighting
  • ~19% improvement over scene-only baselines
  • Face detection coverage: 86.1% via MediaPipe
PyTorchReactFlaskOpenCVCLIP ViT-B/32EmoNetMediaPipe

Twinkl

Values-alignment journal analyzing whether daily behavior reflects stated priorities across ten Schwartz dimensions.

  • VIF: ordinal MLP heads with MC Dropout uncertainty estimation
  • Synthetic data generation: 204 personas, 1,651 journal entries
  • Automated LLM judge labeling pipeline via Claude Code subagents
PyTorchShinyPolarsnomic-embed-textOpenAI APIThree.js

SSL ViT Models

Research on whether fine-tuning shifts self-supervised attention toward semantic features experts consider diagnostic.

  • 6 ViT architectures evaluated across frozen vs. fine-tuned conditions
  • Delta-IoU significance testing framework
  • Interactive React dashboard for attention map exploration
PyTorchFastAPIReactVision Transformers

About

Finance to Data Science to AI Engineering

AI engineer and CFA Charterholder shipping full-stack production AI applications end-to-end—from LLM orchestration and API design to real-time user-facing systems.

Career arc runs from traditional finance (fixed income, portfolio management) through data science to AI engineering, with domain expertise in financial services, insurance, and reinsurance. Currently pursuing a Master of Technology in AI Systems at the National University of Singapore while working as Manager, Data Science at Pacific Life Re.

Skills

AI & Machine Learning

LLM OrchestrationMulti-Agent SystemsRAGAgentic WorkflowsContext EngineeringCost OptimizationStructured Output ExtractionValidate-then-StreamSimulation TestingSelf-Supervised LearningVision TransformersFine-tuning (LoRA)PyTorchNLP

Full-Stack Development

FastAPINext.jsReactTypeScriptWebSocketsPostgreSQLSupabaseTailwind CSSMCP ServersJWT Auth

Languages

PythonTypeScriptSQLR

Domain Expertise

Financial ServicesInsurance & ReinsuranceRegulatory CompliancePortfolio Analytics

Experience

2022–present

Manager, Data Science / Pacific Life Re

Internal AI solutions engineer: deployed AI medical research engine, RAG chatbot, ML underwriting solution

2021

Data Scientist / Circles.Life

Full ML lifecycle for churn/anomaly detection; customer segmentation via clustering

2017–2020

Data Scientist / Fixed Income Analyst / UOB Asset Management

NLP text mining saving dozens to hundreds of man-hours; analytics dashboards

2015–2017

Fixed Income Analyst / Great Eastern Life

Zero credit defaults during tenure; promoted 2017

2011–2014

Assistant Portfolio Manager / Woori Absolute Partners

Promoted to front-office; firm won 4 regional awards (2012–2014)

Education

2025–2026

Master of Technology in AI Systems(Expected)

National University of Singapore

2014

CFA Charterholder

CFA Institute

2009

BSc Management (First Class Honours)

University of London

Get in Touch

Singapore (UTC+08:00)