Emir Bernal | AI/ML Engineer

About Me

Senior Data Scientist and AI Engineer with 7+ years of experience building AI and Machine Learning solutions. I architect AI systems that transform real-world data into business value. My journey began as a self-taught tech enthusiast 14+ years ago, fueled by my passion for "hacking" complex problems. Give me trust and freedom to solve any problem and I will consistently find the most efficient path forward.

"I love optimizing anything, especially when we know the goal but not how to get there."

Experience

Lead AI Engineer @ Sales-Hub

February 2024 - January 2025

Remote • Chino Hills, CA

Architected a real-time AI voicebot solution with sub-800ms latency in production
Led development team of 4 senior engineers, aligning business goals with individual growth goals
Developed a proprietary Spanish TTS model and solved complex streaming and latency challenges for real-time voice interactions
Created training dataset from customer support logs and mentored team on custom Llama model fine-tuning

Senior Data Scientist @ PepsiCo

June 2022 - January 2024

Remote • Mexico City

Redesigned production data pipeline with high quality, maintainable code, achieving a 96% improvement in execution speed (14 hrs → 40 min) serving to more than 4 million clients
Developed SKU prioritization algorithm to optimize logistics and supply chain efficiency
Optimized an internal AI image recognition software solution
Delivered performance metrics(KPI) and monitoring for 2 internal ML solutions

Data Scientist @ BIMBO

January 2022 - June 2022

Remote • Mexico City

Developed a scalable deep learning project used to capture age and gender of clients with face masks on/off
Projected annual revenue for the project was about 15+ Million MXN (761,000 USD) for the company

Search Engine Analyst @ Appen

May 2018 - November 2021

Remote • Freelance US

Worked on multiple projects focusing on data quality, statistical validation, and search performance analytics

Technical Stack

Programming

Python, SQL, JavaScript/Node.js, Go, Bash

AI/ML Frameworks

PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, FastAPI, Transformers, RAG(Milvus), LangChain, Langfuse,Scikit-learn, KerasPySpark, Unsloth, Pydantic, Polars, Jupyter, Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib, Seaborn, OpenAI API,Whisper, Silero VAD, OpenCV

AI/ML Specializations

NLP/LLMs, Fine-tuning (LoRA, QLoRA, transfer learning), Computer Vision, Deep Learning, Voice AI, Edge AI, multimodal AI, Custom AI models, Time Series Forecasting, Recommendation Systems, Geospatial Analytics, Clustering Analysis, Statistical Modeling

DevOps & MLOps

Docker, Kubernetes, Git, CI/CD, Model Deployment, W&B, Prefect, MLflow

Cloud & Infrastructure

AWS (API Gateway, EC2, Lambda, S3, SageMaker), Azure ML, Google Cloud, Databricks

Data Engineering

Apache Spark, Data Lakes PostgreSQL, Redis, ETL Pipelines, Warehousing concepts

Specialized Platforms

WebRTC, Twilio, Telnyx, Genesys, Deepgram, Eleven Labs

Misc

Real-time/streaming Audio Processing, Hardware hacking (Raspberry Pi/Arduino, Android ROMs), Web scraping, Algorithmic trading, Arch Linux (btw)

Featured Projects

SellMeABit

A Bitnet-based AI that pitches me to recruiters based on my latest resume, super cheap & fast LLM

LLMs BitNet Python FastAPI Model Quantization

Pokémon Finder

Real life AI pokedex supporting 898 pokemon, similar projects only support most popular 151

PyTorch Computer Vision Deep Learning CNN Transfer Learning

Horse Predictor

Quick project that predicted which horse would win in a racetrack based on previous real data

Machine Learning Data Analysis Scikit-learn Pandas Predictive Modeling

Hi, I'm Emir Bernal