I’m Darian, a machine learning researcher and founding engineer based in Ithaca, NY.

I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cornell under David Bindel, defended in July 2026 with the degree conferred in August 2026. My dissertation, Practical Algorithms for Multi-Step Lookahead Bayesian Optimization, develops adjoint-mode stochastic gradients, adaptive horizon scheduling, and cost-aware rollout policies that make non-myopic Bayesian optimization computationally practical. Before Cornell I graduated at the top of my class from Morehouse College's computer science department and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society.

What I do that most researchers don't, and most engineers can't, is own the whole path: the mathematical model, the data pipeline, the API, the web application, the cloud infrastructure, the observability, and the deployment. Since October 2025 I have been founding engineer (contract) at ArcScore AI, where I architected and built the production platform end to end, designed the core scoring and NIL-valuation methodology alongside two other modeling leads, and own significant portions of the application, data, infrastructure, and engineering roadmap.

My Ph.D. research was punctuated by industry research internships. At Adobe I integrated voice and gesture commands for image manipulation, combining speech recognition with natural-language understanding. At IBM Research I worked on local control of 2D-mesh routing for analog AI accelerators. At AMD Research I developed uncertainty-quantification methods for machine learning surrogate models that accelerate physics-based simulations, work that produced a NeurIPS ML4PS workshop paper and named me an inventor on US patent application 2025/0005236 A1.

My final internship was at LinkedIn, on the Applied Research team, where I built a predictive model for a confidential nine-figure hardware-allocation forecasting problem and improved on the existing methodology by 13.39%. Earlier, as an undergraduate, I was introduced to industry engineering standards at Google and spent time on research in human-computer interaction at Stanford and mathematical biology at Morehouse.

I'm open to full-time research, ML systems, and senior engineering roles, and I take selective consulting and fractional technical leadership work through darian.ai. In my spare time I read, explore new areas of mathematics, play pool, and train.