Gerry — Agentic AI Application Engineer

Hey, I'm Gerry

I build AI systems that actually work in production

AI demos are magic, but going from that to a reliable system your customers depend on is a whole other skill. I can do both. Think real-time agents assisting in global calls, or personal assistants that remember what you said three weeks ago.

Low-latency Tool orchestration Observability Evaluators & Guardrails
  • Real-time translation: VAD → streaming STT → agentic translation → TTS/voice clone over → WebRTC with sub-second targets.
  • Local-first personal assistant that outperforms Siri/Google/Alexa on context continuity, cross-session memory, vague queries, and self-adding tools.
  • SRE/backend history: AWS/GCP/Bare Metal; Kubernetes/GitOps/Pulumi; Grafana/Prometheus/Loki; cut deploys from hours to minutes and raised SLO adherence.

The AI patterns I love building

  • Tool-calling agents that actually handle failures gracefully (with timeouts, retries, and proper error handling)
  • Smart planners that break down complex tasks while respecting latency budgets
  • Retrieval systems optimized for short context and predictable costs
  • Guardrails & evaluators that catch issues before your customers do
  • Streaming UX that feels instant (WebRTC, SSE, all the good stuff)

What I'm building

Private, operational locally
Real-time Translation System

Low-latency, voice-to-voice translation with voice cloning over WebRTC. Built to push the limits of streaming pipelines under real constraints.

Problem

Frictionless cross-language voice chat that feels instant while preserving speaker identity — over real networks, not lab conditions.

Research Deep Dives

  • WebRTC: Server-side implementation challenges and networking optimizations
  • Text-to-speech & Speech-to-text: Evaluating models for accuracy vs latency tradeoffs
  • Single model Speech-to-Speech: Evaluating models and their tradeoffs
  • Voice Activity Detection (VAD): Reliable detection across different speaking patterns
  • Inter-language voice cloning: Preserving speaker characteristics across language boundaries
  • Psychology in UX design: Working around latency limitations through perceptual tricks
  • Efficient networking: Traffic flow design for heavy real-time applications
  • Creative traffic flow design: Custom routing and data flow

Demo

The project is not yet ready to demo. But here is a look at what is possible. The following was made by cloning my voice speaking English

Status

Still working on this in my free time. Building this as a solo dev is quite the challenge as there are a lot of areas that need refinement to turn a proof of concept into something that is production ready.

Personal Agentic Assistant - personal tool

A powerful desktop voice assistant with persistent memory, self-tool generation, and deep OS integration. Built to outperform mainstream assistants on contextuality and actionable help.

Problem

Speech is about ~3-5 times faster than typing. Being able to trigger voice typing with a wake word and switch to an intelligent assistant is something I've wanted ever since seeing the movie Her. I'm not quite there yet but it is shockingly close.

Capabilities

  • On demand: The system uses Voice detection, commands and wake words to know when to listen and to what
  • Cross-session recall: Long-running conversational memory;
  • Self-extends: The agent can write and register new tools for its own use
  • Search: Web + local docs in-context
  • Desktop control: reads clipboard; types into fields;
  • Desktop context WIP: reads from apps across my desktop (hard part already done)

Demo

This was my first ever YouTube video, I'll improve and gain confidence talking to myself on camera, but for now please bear with it. :) I noticed people stopped watching before even seeing the interesting part, so I've now set this to skip right to it. Feel free to go back if have a higher tolerance for rambling.

Why it Matters

Beats Siri/Google/Alexa on context handling, adaptability, and actual task execution — while running locally for privacy and low latency.

Where I've been

Learning and creating numerous projects

Solo • August 2024 - Now

I decided it was time to work on my own dreams and study things I really wanted to learn.

  • Investment and strategies
  • I took a deep dive into Encryption.
  • Spun up a site to help people find better jobs.
  • Worked on a site to enable the sharing of zero-trust truly anonymous feedback
  • Built a personal agentic assistant with persistent memory (shown above)
  • Research and development on real-time translation systems (shown above)
  • Built proof of concept for reading application contexts on screen
  • I also traveled extensively

I ended up pivoting away from the feedback site after a recent technical breakthrough made my current project feasible (see above). However I intend to come back and finish the feedback application as it is something that needs to exist. I feel much of the world's current issues, both large and small stem from people not feeling free to speak honestly with each other.

Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Workday • August 2021 - 2024

Supported global applications in data centers, GCP, and AWS Kubernetes clusters. Focused on automating operations to simplify management of customer-impacting issues and enhance recovery times.

Key achievements:

  • Improved internal CI/CD systems for company-wide use
  • Developed tools for automatic triage of PagerDuty issues and enhanced alerts with relevant context to reduce investigation time
  • Improved monitoring and alerting systems across global infrastructure
  • Managed interviewing and hiring for the Dublin team
  • Mentored team members and prepared Dublin and Prague teams for on-call responsibilities
  • Collaborated daily with US-based teams, contributing to the successful establishment and growth of the Dublin team

Cloud Native Engineer

Container Solutions • August 2019 - August 2020

Client-facing consulting work improving how organizations build and deliver software using cloud-native technologies.

Key achievements:

  • Rolled out CI/CD systems using Kubernetes, Istio and cloud-native tooling
  • Mentored engineers on automated software testing, deployment strategies and team effectiveness
  • Worked with highly skilled engineering teams to make operations run smoother
  • Focused on practical implementation of cloud-native patterns

Senior Developer

Marketplacer • November 2016 - June 2019

Development, platform scalability and data integrations for two of the biggest clients on the platform.

Key achievements:

  • Led development on major client implementations
  • Mentored other developers on complex ecommerce challenges
  • Transitioned deployments into CI pipeline to remove mental burden from developers
  • Improved visibility into deployment process for entire team
  • Significantly sped up CI build times through optimization

Senior Developer

Vinomofo • August 2016 - November 2016

Key achievements:

  • Development of new warehouse and delivery integration
  • Fixed critical legacy fulfillment logic and added comprehensive testing
  • Discovered and resolved tricky database locking, transaction and timing issues
  • Added audit trails for critical business processes
  • Updated site design for national ad campaign with automated launch
  • Extracted common code into reusable components

Senior Dev/Ops & Lead Roles

Netfira Pty. Ltd. • 2012 - 2015

Multiple roles with increasing responsibility: Senior Developer → Lead Web Dev/Ops → Senior Dev/Ops (External)

  • Managed and improved AWS infrastructure
  • Trained and mentored other developers
  • Led interviewing process for new team members
  • Developed new infrastructure and projects
  • Worked extensively with product stakeholders

Early Career

2006 - 2012

  • Moodle HQ (2011-2012): Core Moodle development, planning improvements, mentoring, integration testing
  • Future Health Media & Technology (2009-2011): Co-Owner/Ops/Dev - Product planning, infrastructure, development for HealthEngine and Popfossa
  • Buzka Pty Ltd (2006-2009): Junior Developer → Development Lead → CTO - Full career progression at technology startup

The story so far

I started out as a developer, but quickly discovered I was just as fascinated by the infrastructure that keeps software running. SRE was the perfect fit — using programming to automate away infrastructure headaches.

Plot twist: After 15+ years of making systems more reliable, faster deployments, and bulletproof monitoring, I got completely hooked on AI. Not the hype part — the engineering challenge of making these systems actually work when real people depend on them.

What I'm building right now: A real-time translation system that works over terrible WiFi (seriously, try video calling from a coffee shop), and a personal assistant that remembers context across conversations. Both sound simple until you try to make them reliable enough for daily use.

My weird advantage: I bring the same "this needs to work at 3am when everything is broken" mindset to AI systems. If your AI demo is impressive but falls over under load, or costs $50 per conversation, let's talk.

The toolkit that got me here

  • AI Engineering: LLM tooling, RAG, red-teaming, MCP servers, agentic systems
  • Real-time Systems: WebRTC, voice processing, sub-second latency optimization
  • Infrastructure: Pulumi, Kubernetes, Docker, multi-AZ AWS/GCP
  • CI/CD: Sub-30-second builds, parallel testing, deployment automation
  • Languages: Ruby, TypeScript, Python, Go, Crystal
  • Leadership: Mentoring, hiring, team building, on-call preparation

Let's chat

I'm always up for interesting conversations about AI engineering, reliability challenges, or just geeking out about tech. If you're building something cool and think we might work well together, I'd love to hear from you.