I was born in Caracas, Venezuela — one day before a lunar eclipse, which had my mom really worried for some reason. As far as I can tell, it had no effect.
We moved to Miami, FL when I was 12. The US was never the plan, we just kind of up and went. Moving here changed me — mostly because I met some fascinating people I would have never met otherwise.
I watched the Iron Man movie right before we left. Loved Tony Stark, but what I really wanted was a Jarvis. So 12 year old me decided to build one. Only problem: I didn't know how to code and all the tutorials were in English. So I taught myself English, then taught myself to code. It's been a thing ever since.
Which is how I ended up at UF studying computer science, where I got my first taste of research at the SimLab — building medical simulations to train battlefield doctors. It scratched an itch I didn't know I had: building systems to understand something real. But I was also drawn to the startup energy around campus — joined a few, ended up at a game dev studio, learned at breakneck pace. I liked the tight loop: build something, watch it meet reality the same day.
Next came Tesla, where I learned what fast actually looks like, then Microsoft — I'd wanted to work there since I was a kid poking around Windows 7, and ended up optimizing battery behavior for Copilot before it shipped to a billion devices. Massive scale, tight feedback loops, but the problems didn't always feel quite "real". Which led me to join G2X as a founding engineer building federal procurement software instead. Turns out government problems are some of the most real ones I've found — I've investigated fraud cases with the FBI, redesigned aging data systems at CMS, and presented findings to the Coast Guard, which even won an AFFIRM award along the way.
These days my work is research: at Mechanize, I design RL environments and alignment evals for frontier models — building the worlds they learn in, and studying whether they actually learned what we intended. Twelve-year-old me wanted to build Jarvis. Turns out the work that came closest is figuring out whether Jarvis behaves.
Along the way I moved to Seattle for Microsoft, then New York, and now in San Francisco. Picked up snowboarding and got way too into it — I'm on a Custom Camber X with step-on bindings, if that means anything to you. Started training BJJ, which is humbling in a way that's hard to explain until someone half your size chokes you out. I've got a motorcycle I tear apart on weekdays and take to the track on weekends. And somewhere in there I got really into espresso — still can't do latte art, but the coffee's good.