Pats Laurel

I'm a machine learning engineer at Thinking Machines, where I design and ship AI systems for clients: agents, data platforms, and the architecture around them. I couldn't understand matrices until I could drag them around, so I started building pages that let me, and writing them up as essays.

Based on the first widget in my LoRA essay. On the left is a 64 × 64 corner of a real weight update from fine-tuning GPT-2 on movie reviews, and on the right is the same corner rebuilt from a single piece, with 16% error across the whole update.
Read the LoRA essay

Essays

Newest essay · · 9 min readWhy LoRA works: fine-tuning a giant model with a tiny matrixI fine-tuned GPT-2 on movie reviews and found the weight update could be rebuilt from a handful of small pieces. This essay lets you rebuild it yourself, one rank at a time.

Older writing

AWS and machine learning guides I wrote for Tutorials Dojo in 2023 and 2024.

All writing, with descriptions

About

I work at Thinking Machines in Metro Manila as an engineering consultant. Client work runs from agent and solution architecture to data platforms and the proposals and cost models that come before any code. A lot of the job is sitting with a client, working out what they actually need, and cutting the scope down to something we can ship.

Before that I led a small team building AI products at NuWorks, ran data science for a small startup in London, wrote AWS guides for Tutorials Dojo, and reviewed capstone code for project teams at Eskwelabs.

On the side I'm learning how models actually run on hardware: GPU kernels, compilers, and inference. I hold AWS Cloud Practitioner, AWS AI Practitioner, AWS Machine Learning Engineer Associate, and Azure AI Engineer Associate certifications.

Work

  1. Machine Learning Engineer · Engineering Consultant

    Thinking Machines Data Science

    Sep 2025 to present · Philippines · Remote

    Client projects from the first brief through delivery: agent architecture on AWS, data-platform design, proposals and cost models, and the build itself. I also write our internal engineering standards, multi-cloud runbooks, and AI-assisted project templates that cut new-project setup from about two weeks to a day.

  2. Team Lead, Full Stack Engineer (AI)

    NuWorks Interactive Labs

    Mar 2024 to Sep 2025 · Full-time

    Led a small team shipping AI products end to end: model integrations, application code, deployments, and the production work after launch.

  3. Full Stack Engineer

    NuWorks Interactive Labs

    Oct 2023 to Feb 2024 · Part-time · Remote

    Joined part-time, shipped product features and model integrations, then moved into the lead role.

  4. Technical Writer

    Tutorials Dojo

    Oct 2023 to Feb 2024 · Contract

    Wrote AWS and machine-learning guides on SageMaker pipelines, serverless inference, and model fairness.

  5. Head of Data Science

    Short Stay AI

    Jun 2023 to Feb 2024 · London, UK · Remote

    Owned the models, AWS setup, and data pipelines for a small London startup.

  6. Data Science Mentor

    Eskwelabs

    Sep 2022 to Feb 2024 · Part-time

    Reviewed capstone code and helped project teams make better technical decisions.

Talks

I've given talks at AWS Community Day Manila, universities, and local meetups, mostly about production ML and evals.

All talks and slides

Tools

What I use day to day, plus a few I'm still learning.

Languages
Python, TypeScript
ML
PyTorch, Hugging Face, scikit-learn
LLM & RAG
LangChain, PydanticAI, Amazon Bedrock, pgvector, Bedrock AgentCore
Infra & MLOps
Databricks, AWS, Azure, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, MLflow
Full-Stack
FastAPI, Next.js, React
Learning
C, C++, CUDA, Rust

Contact

If you're building ML systems or agents, or working on inference, compilers, or GPU software, I'd like to hear about it. Email me at dev@patslaurel.com or use the form.

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