Pats Laurel
ML Engineer at Thinking Machines.
Building interactive visual essays to make math click.
ML Engineer at Thinking Machines, BS Data Science student at IIT Guwahati, and writer of interactive visual essays that turn math into something you can drag, warp, and play with.
/ LATEST ESSAY
What Does a Matrix Actually Do?
Drag vectors, warp grids, and discover that a 2×2 grid of numbers is secretly a transformation machine. An interactive visual essay on rotation, scaling, shearing, and the geometry hiding inside every matrix.
About
ML Engineer by day, student by night
/ WHO I AM
ML Engineer at Thinking Machines. BS Data Science student at IIT Guwahati. I dropped out, taught myself how models actually work, then went back for the degree on my own terms. Long-term goal: research at the intersection of HPC, AI, and astrophysics.
/ WHAT I DO
I turn research into production ML — RAG systems that don't hallucinate, agents that survive real edge cases, evals that actually catch regressions. On the side, I build interactive visual essays: study notes you can drag, warp, and play with until the math clicks.
/ PHILOSOPHY
I refuse to learn anything without truly understanding it. So I build playgrounds until the math clicks.
/ BASED IN
Metro Manila, Philippines
/ FOCUS
AI Engineering
/ STATUS
Available
Experience
Where I work and what I build
/ Machine Learning Engineer
Thinking Machines Data ScienceSep 2025 — Present
Philippines · Remote
Building enterprise AI and data platforms for clients across the private, public, and non-profit sectors — GenAI and LLM systems, data pipelines, and the ML engineering that takes a prototype from notebook to something a team actually runs in production. TM is OpenAI's first boutique consulting partner in APAC.
/ Team Lead — Full Stack Engineer (AI)
NuWorks Interactive LabsMar 2024 — Sep 2025
Full-time
Led a team building AI-powered full-stack systems end to end — from model integration to production rollout.
/ Full Stack Engineer
NuWorks Interactive LabsOct 2023 — Feb 2024
Part-time · Remote
Joined part-time before stepping into the team lead role — shipped full-stack features and AI integrations that paved the way for the AI track on the team.
/ Technical Writer
Tutorials DojoOct 2023 — Feb 2024
Contract
Wrote long-form AWS and machine learning tutorials — SageMaker pipelines, serverless inference, AI fairness with Clarify, and more. Several pieces are still in the Writing section.
/ Head of Data Science
Short Stay AIJun 2023 — Feb 2024
London, UK · Remote
Led the data science function for a London-based startup — owned modeling, AWS-based infrastructure, and the data pipelines feeding the product.
/ Data Science Mentor
EskwelabsSep 2022 — Feb 2024
Part-time
Mentored data science bootcamp learners through capstones, code reviews, and career prep — the work that first convinced me I wanted to teach the math, not just ship the model.
/ INTERACTIVE VISUAL ESSAYS
Self-published interactive study notes — drag, warp, and play with the math until it clicks. Built with Next.js, KaTeX, Canvas/WebGL, and Three.js. The newest one lets you grab vectors and watch a 2×2 matrix transform space in real time.
/ COMMUNITY
Talks at AWS Community Day Manila and other conferences, universities, and tech meetups on production ML, LLM evaluation, and AI safety in real systems.
/ AVAILABILITY
Open to collaborations and side projects
Tech Stack
Tools I use daily
/ Languages
/ ML & GPU
/ LLM & RAG
/ Infra & MLOps
/ Full-Stack
Let's talk.
Production ML, interactive essays, study collabs, or anything in between — happy to hear from you.
/ LOCATION
Metro Manila, Philippines
/ STATUS
Reading new messages
/ SEND MESSAGE