• Building Atlassian’s deep research - planning, reflection, multi-agent coordination.

Things I did

• Built Atlassian’s RAG stack up from 55% -> 89% answer accuracy, beating our main competitor in a blind side-by-side user test. Mainly involved building a query understanding stage, a passage ranking stage, and then lots and lots of evals. This was one of the most enjoyable things I’ve ever done - worked with tons of cool people.
• Contributed to EleutherAI’s automated mech interp evaluation pipeline Delphi, built a semantic index so the pipeline can add semantically similar but non-activating examples as ‘hard negatives’ along with activating examples, so the LLM feature explainers are less prone to creating overly confident and incorrect feature labels.
• Led a project that built an experimental search platform from scratch, allowed Atlassian to experiment with multi-vector semantic index for the first time, and showed a ~30% recall improvement over production baseline. I probably learned more new skills in these few months than the previous 3 years combined.
• Managed the implementation and rollout of a smart load balancer for Atlassian’s search infrastructure. The project rolled out to 10k+ tenants ahead of schedule, with zero incidents - involved the building of dozens of custom scripts and monitoring workflows.
• Co-authored a paper during my undergrad on two ways to improve problem compilation for Adiabatic Quantum Computers. We went into it because Quantum Computing was cool, but it was pretty obvious to everyone that AQC wasn’t the paradigm of the future. A lovely piece of coincidence I discovered later is that the head of our research group was also Shane Legg’s supervisor.
• Worked at Halter, an AgTech startup, on geofencing algorithms that let dairy farmers control the paddock layout using software, and custom GPS algorithms that do low power, low cost atmospheric distortion correction. This was where I met my wife :)
• Interned at Thought-Wired, built an IMU (accelerometer, gyro, magnetometer) powered head tracker, to help children with cerebral palsy use computers. This was my first technical role — I had never coded before, I volunteered for an unpaid internship after reading Wait But Why’s Neuralink blog.
• Did an undergrad in mechatronics engineering, then moved to software
  • Spent most of the first 2 years obsessed with startups, went to all the startup-related events, joined all the startup clubs, even started one myself to host talks by local founders, and in the end decided I needed to grow my technical skills a lot more if I wanted to build anything useful.
  • That led to working with a group of undergrads building a nanosatellite, for a proof of concept to show that fluctuations of electron density in the ionosphere can predict earthquakes. It was a lot of fun, but the sat stopped responding minutes after deployment :D
• Did a lot of sales as a teen, started with selling wireless broadband door to door, then did a bit of retail sales. I honestly loved the process a lot, it’s the closest I’ve gotten to playing a sport, and only stopped because I needed time to grow my technical experience.

Writings

• Agent memory

Soup recipe

Broth

• 1 stewing chicken, 1 stewing duck (stewing means aged, making it 10x better for soup)
• remove as much skin and fat as possible, then render the fat with garlic and spring onion
• add the resulting crispy skin, spring onion and garlic in with rest of the poultry
• skim until clear of scum, then move to pressure cooker for 1 hour
• afterwards, remove and strain the meat, break it up, fry until slightly caramelised
• add the broth back to the caramelised meat and cook for another hour, extracting flavour
• strain, then cook broth with kombu and bonito flakes until flavour is incorporated
• cook 3 heirloom tomatoes on low heat until completely dissolved, strain into broth

Soup

• fry 4 new (non-stewing) duck legs in duck fat, then remove and drain the oil, leaving the caramelised bits
• marinate various mushrooms in tare (soy, mirin, sake)
• fry mushrooms in remaining fat
• add back duck legs, add broth, cook until tender

Garnish

• fry leek in duck fat until slightly crispy

Some photos I like