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Sepehr Laal's CV

• Email: agent@3p3r.com
• Location: Portland, OR
• Website: 3p3r.com

Education

Portland State University, MSc. in Signal Processing -- Portland, OR

MSc.

2019 – 2023

• Thesis: BodySLAM; SLAM for tracking human kinematics; advisor James McNames

• First-author article in Sensors (Dec 2022) based on thesis research

Portland State University, BSc. in Electrical Engineering -- Portland, OR

BSc.

2016 – 2018

• Dean's Scholarship, Maseeh College of Engineering; awarded twice

Portland Community College, ASc. in General Engineering -- Portland, OR

ASc.

2013 – 2015

Publications

BodySLAM: Feasibility of Tracking Human Kinematics with Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)

Apr 2023

Thesis version of Sensors (2022) article; advisor James McNames

Sepehr Laal

10.15760/etd.3557 (M.S. Thesis, Portland State University, ECE)

Feasibility of Tracking Human Kinematics with Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

Dec 2022

Journal article from thesis research (Special Issue on Smart and Personalized Healthcare); first author; PSU ECE

Sepehr Laal, Paul Vasilyev, Sean Pearson, Mateo Aboy, James McNames

10.3390/s22239378 (Sensors 2022, 22(23), 9378)

Validation of Media Using Fingerprinting

Sept 2021

Granted patent for media validation using wavelet decomposition fingerprinting; sole inventor; AWS Elemental

Sepehr Laal

patents.google.com/patent/US11134279B1/en (US 11,134,279 B1, Amazon Technologies Inc)

Honors and Awards

• Dean's Scholarship, Maseeh College of Engineering, Portland State University - awarded twice (2016-2018)

Experience

Citi Bank, Senior VP of AI/ML Engineering and RL Infrastructure -- Portland, OR

2025 – present

• Deployed and managed a multi-tenant n8n infrastructure on OpenShift

• Designed and implemented a scalable topology of LiteLLM deployments to standardize model access across orgs

• Architected and implemented a multi-tenant RL infrastructure to facilitate workflows of AI/ML engineers

• Architected and deployed shared agentic coding and data-conversion services, enabling 10,000+ engineers to incorporate AI into their workflows

• Deployed isolated browser-automation infrastructure for agentic browsing and data extraction

• Integrated model evaluation into AI workflows and gateways to support transparent evaluation and fine-tuning

• Deployed prompt-caching services to reduce inference cost and latency across organizations

• Mentor junior engineers on AI/ML infrastructure, system design, and engineering practices

Citi Bank, Senior VP of Cloud Security and Infrastructure -- Portland, OR

2020 – 2025

• Designed, implemented and maintained a transparent Guardrail service for bank's AWS account inventory

• 4+ years of maintaining and operating a development kit for cloud engineers to create and deploy new guardrails

• Designed, architected, and implemented a sub-millisecond LALR parser engine that reduced the cost of processing billions of AWS Event Rules across all AWS accounts by approximately $1M per month, using Tree-sitter and Rust

• Mentored and trained junior engineers on AWS security, infrastructure best practices, and their journey into FinServ cloud ops

Monada Inc., Programming Language Architect -- Tel Aviv, Israel

2022 – 2023

• Architected and delivered the first version of the WingLang reference, a commercial programming language for building polymorphic cloud applications.

• Researched and implemented a transparent type system for WingLang to interoperate with the JSII ecosystem.

• Collaborated with engineers and researchers across the world to build the WingLang compiler and runtime, implementing the core specification.

Stelligent Systems LLC, DevOps Automation Engineer II -- Portland, OR

2019 – 2020

• Architected an AWS solution for Schneider Electric involving AWS Direct Connect, legacy system APIs, incident response, telemetry, and AWS Cognito bridged with enterprise authentication in a 100% Lambda serverless environment

• Architected an AWS solution for First Republic Bank involving AWS S3, AWS CloudWatch, AWS Cloudtrail and automated threat intelligence pipelines using AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions

• Led development of Stelligent Mutato, a serverless framework for deploying containerized applications into any AWS account in a Heroku-like workflow; patterns later appeared in the official AWS CDK pipelines module

• Prepared technical documents and hosted a webinar for an internal hackathon at First Republic Bank in San Francisco

RootStream, Co-Founder and CTO -- San Francisco, CA

2018 – 2019

• Helped DotDotDash deploy RootStream, a low latency WebRTC based video streaming platform during Covid-19

• Architected and implemented a serverless WebRTC video ingestion platform on AWS Lambda

• Optimized the Chromium build pipeline using Docker, reducing overhead from hours to minutes

• Incorporated SQS and API Gateway WebSockets to replicate Socket IO on AWS serverless deployments

• Automated Ubuntu kernel AMI creation using Packer and CodeBuild for video ingestion and consumption

• Used Kinesis Video Streams to ingest massive amounts of video data into S3, running inference on it in realtime

Virtulabs LLC., Software Consulting and Contracting -- San Francisco, CA

2017 – 2019

• Used Vuforia and Vuforia Cloud to create augmented reality experiences

• Developed medical mixed-reality training and visualization experiences with HoloLens and Unity3D

• Used ARCore Cloud Anchors to create shared AR experiences on Android

• Developed a health-behavior mobile app that rewards physical activity for Semler Heart using Expo and React Native

• Used CircleCI, DroneCI, GitHub, CodePipeline, and Heroku across multiple projects

• Used s3-fuse in production to back up artifacts and outputs into S3

• Used Elastic Beanstalk, ECS, API Gateway, and Lambda across multiple projects

AWS Elemental Technologies, Software Development Engineer II -- Portland, OR

2017 – 2018

• Led R&D of an automated golden-ear testing system for audio encoders, discovering decades-old defects in legacy encoders and contributing to sole-inventor patent US 11,134,279 B1 for media fingerprinting validation

• Implemented Waveprint, an efficient wavelet-based audio fingerprinting system in CUDA C++

• Implemented new features and fixed bugs in the Elemental Live product

Helio Interactive PDX, Software Engineer -- Portland, OR

2015 – 2017

• Built an ASP.NET MVC CMS with multi-zone replicated SQL Server and offline support

• Used RabbitMQ and MQTT to create realtime IoT applications with limited connectivity

• Used GStreamer to create multi-computer synchronized video playback for video walls

• Used Unity3D to make custom software and solutions for entertainment events

• Developed shaders using GLSL, HLSL, and NVIDIA Cg for realtime renderers

• Developed a replica of Restart On Crash for Unity3D to handle crashes in production

• Collaborated with designers and artists to create immersive experiences for events and exhibitions

Downstream PDX, Junior Software Engineer -- Portland, OR

2014 – 2015

• Worked on a multi-computer renderer able to render massive pixel spaces across network-bound PCs with discrete NVIDIA GPUs, creating frame-accurate video streams for live events and exhibitions across displays

• Worked on the low level NTP protocol used by the multi-computer renderer to render synced video files across PCs

• Used C++, Cinder, and OpenFrameworks to create custom entertainment software

• Used FFmpeg, VLC, and GStreamer to add multimedia capabilities to the renderer

• Developed low-level graphical applications with OpenGL and C++11

Open Source Projects

Sparse Dynamics

2026

Antivirus and anti prompt injection tooling for AI harnesses - Guardian CLI scans agent skills before execution; Trypanophobe reference backend for policy and enforcement; Paladin (kernel-level harness safety) in development

LibSLAM

2018

Heavily modified ORB-SLAM2 packaged as a reusable Linux library; foundational visual-SLAM infrastructure for the BodySLAM human-kinematics research

Cinder Doppler

2015

Implementation of Microsoft Research's SoundWave technique for motion tracking from Doppler shifts in reflected audio

Cinder Wavelets

2016

Real-time wavelet decomposition in Cinder with side-by-side FFT visualization; early signal-processing work related to later audio-fingerprinting research

LiveCam

2016

Open-source high performance video streaming system built with GStreamer and Node.js

Tree Sitter EventRule

2023

Tree-sitter grammar for AWS EventBridge event patterns; ships rule2rego, a compiler that transpiles Event Rules to OPA Rego policies on the fly

Particle Filter Localization

2017

CUDA particle-filter library for real-time camera pose estimation on checkerboard scenes without PnP; MATLAB orchestration, adapted from JEI 2014 camera-tracking research - written from scratch with custom CUDA kernels

Invited Talks

• cdk-web and managing infrastructure directly in browser - CDK Day 2022, May 2022

• Hosted a technical webinar and prepared hackathon materials for First Republic Bank - San Francisco, 2019

Certifications

• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional (2019) - Verification RNXRXBF1F2QE1C59

• AWS Certified Developer Associate (2019) - Verification 02514XVKMJBQQ2WS

Skills

Primary Languages: ANSI C / C++, JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust

Other Languages: Python, PHP, GLSL, HLSL, Cg, C#, Shell, Matlab

Tooling & Libraries: Unity3D, UE4, ASP.NET, React, React Native, Expo SDK, CUDA, MQTT, RabbitMQ, WebSockets, OpenGL, Terraform, GStreamer, FFmpeg, DroneCI, CircleCI, Jenkins, Git, GitHub

Containers & Sandboxing: Docker, ECS, ECR, WASM, Web Workers, Landlocks

Databases: MongoDB, DocumentDB, MySQL, MSSQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Redis

Operating Systems: Ubuntu, Amazon Linux, CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Windows

Cloud Infrastructure: CloudFormation, AWS CDK, Azure, GCP, Alibaba, Terraform, Pulumi

AI Harness & RL Infrastructure: LiteLLM, n8n, OpenCode, OpenChamber, Web Fetch, Markdown conversion, DeepEval, Prompt Caching, Cloakbrowser, RLHF, RL, Lakera

AI Local Inference: Ollama, vLLM, Qwen family, Gemma 4 architecture, LLamaFile, Llama.cpp, HF transformers