DW.
Available for opportunities

David West

AI Engineer

Building intelligent systems at the intersection of AI and software engineering.

6+
Years AI/ML
8+
Years Defense
5
Projects
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Projects

Selected work

This Portfolio

The site you are on: a RAG chatbot answering recruiter questions, with an eval suite that scores retrieval on every commit, gates CI, and publishes its own results.

Next.jsTypeScriptFastAPIPythonOpenAIRAGFAISSBM25EvalsCI/CD

Baby Names Explorer

Explorer for 145 years of US baby name data, with pooled LightGBM popularity forecasts, conformal uncertainty bands, and a natural-language SQL chatbot.

Next.jsTypeScriptFastAPIPythonGroqSQLiteTime SeriesLightGBMData VisualizationCI/CD

Chat with Nietzsche

Streaming RAG chatbot that answers in Nietzsche’s voice, grounded in hybrid search over his complete works with cited passages.

Next.jsTypeScriptFastAPIPythonGroqRAGFAISSBM25CI/CD

Generate Music with AI

Full-stack app that turns a text prompt into an original track, proxying to the ACE-Step model running on serverless GPUs.

Next.jsTypeScriptFastAPIPythonModalGPU InferenceGenerative AudioCI/CD

Diamonds: Predicting Price

Regression and tree-based modeling to predict diamond prices from physical attributes, with a full EDA written end to end in R.

RTidyverseRandom ForestData Science

About

Who I am

Background

I'm a Lead Data Scientist recently turned Lead AI Engineer with a background in the defense industry since 2018, building ML systems since 2020 and production full-stack LLM applications since 2025.

My work spans the full AI stack from enterprise Document AI in AWS GovCloud and evaluated RAG pipelines to pooled gradient-boosted time-series forecasting and full-stack web applications.

Having spent my career developing defense systems for the US Army and Air Force, security, precision, and operational reliability are foundational to everything I build.

I bring active Secret clearance and CompTIA Security+ rigor, Infrastructure as Code, and automated CI/CD evaluation gates to every system I deliver.

Capabilities

Languages
PythonTypeScriptRSQLBash
AI / ML
LLMsDocument AIRAGHybrid SearchFAISSBM25Cross-Encoder Re-rankingSentence TransformersPrompt EngineeringLightGBMScikit-LearnTime-Series ForecastingConformal PredictionEvaluation HarnessesOllamaHuggingFace
Frameworks
FastAPINext.jsReactTailwind CSSStreamlit
Cloud / Infra
AWS (GovCloud)TerraformTerragruntKubernetes (EKS)Docker (Chainguard and Iron Bank)GitHub ActionsModalRailwayVercel
APIs
GroqOpenAIAnthropicAWS Bedrock

Contact

Let's connect

I'm open to AI engineering roles, applied ML work, and interesting side projects. Whether you're building something ambitious or just want to talk shop, reach out.