richguilmain

Resume

richguilmain@gmail.com | github.com/rguilmain | linkedin.com/in/richguilmain

SUMMARY

Applied Machine Learning Engineer with 15+ years building and scaling production systems across search, recommendations, and LLM applications. Improved search and ranking, lifting CTR from 24% to 52% and content start rate from 12% to 26%. Proven technical leader, translating ambiguous ML problems into systems across cross-functional teams.

EXPERIENCE

Independent Machine Learning Engineer | Self-Employed 04/2022 – Present

  • Won Foldit’s December 2022 protein-design contest with a custom optimization system
  • Developed open-source protein-folding software using stochastic perturbation and hill climbing
  • Prototyped agentic RAG applications with tool use, citation grounding, and conversational memory with LangGraph
  • Delivered USPTO office-action timeline visualizations to support workload forecasting for a patent-analytics venture

Senior Machine Learning Engineer | Pluralsight 06/2019 – 04/2022

  • Doubled search engagement, adding 1M+ monthly learner conversions through ranking and relevance improvements
  • Developed click modeling, personalization, and online-reranking algorithms for real-time relevance optimization
  • Led cross-functional delivery of production hybrid search and recommendation systems for EdTech content
  • Built auto-scaling REST APIs on AWS, ETL and training pipelines in Airflow, and observability dashboards with Grafana
  • Served as technical lead and mentor, aligning key stakeholders on search quality, roadmap, and execution priorities

Machine Learning Research Programmer | Information Sciences Institute 11/2017 – 03/2019

  • Conducted DARPA- and IARPA-funded applied research in natural language processing
  • Architected neural machine translation models for cross-language information retrieval in low-resource languages
  • Built a Python-on-Linux HPC pipeline to transform unstructured text into a knowledge graph for causal inference

Software Engineer | FarSounder 08/2011 – 11/2017

  • Engineered safety-critical 3D forward-looking sonar systems to prevent vessel groundings in a startup environment
  • Implemented estimation, filtering, thresholding, target detection, tracking, and image stabilization algorithms
  • Developed real-time simultaneous localization and mapping software providing 3D environmental data visualizations
  • Collaborated closely with international users and stakeholders to align product capabilities with operational needs

EDUCATION

Master of Science in Computer Science | Georgia Institute of Technology 01/2014 – 12/2016

  • Specialization in Machine Learning

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science | University of Rhode Island 09/2008 – 05/2012

  • Minors in Mathematics and Jazz Studies

SKILLS

Expertise: statistics, optimization, LLMs, RAG, NLP, hybrid search, model evaluation, monitoring, MLOps, CI/CD

Technology: Python, SQL, PyTorch, TensorFlow, NumPy, Pandas, scikit-learn, Hugging Face, LangChain, LlamaIndex

Infrastructure: AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda, SageMaker), Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Airflow, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Snowflake