Lester Solbakken
Founding Engineer at HORNET
Trondheim, Trøndelag, Norway
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolLester Solbakken is a founding engineer and seasoned principal software engineer with 11 years of industry experience and a PhD-focused background in AI and machine learning. He specializes in generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation, serving systems, and search ranking, bringing research rigor from neural networks and self-organizing systems into production-grade services. His career includes senior roles across Yahoo/Verizon Media and contributions to Vespa.ai’s core engine—improving tensor operations and type resolution for large-scale online AI+data workloads. Based in Trondheim, Norway, he combines a rare mix of deep academic training and hands-on backend systems engineering, plus an economics and leadership foundation that informs pragmatic product decisions. Notably, his open-source work on Vespa enhanced tensor functionality that directly boosts performance for real-time ML inference.
11 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitetBI Norwegian Business SchoolBSc, BSc at Sør-Trøndelag University College (HiST)Gründerskolen
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (9)
tensorrt10
javas10
machine-learning10
tensor10
tensorflow10
operation10
java10
cpp9
big-data9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
vespa-engine/vespa
Jun 2016 - Jan 2023
AI + Data, online. https://vespa.ai
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:168 reviews, 736 commits, 494 PRs in 6 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Lester primarily focused on improving the Java-based type resolving and function implementations within the Vespa engine. The contributions include implementing tensor cell type resolving for various operations like join, concat, merge, and rename, and adding testing. Furthermore, the user worked on adding a non-primitive expand function. These modifications enhance the tensor functionality and performance within the Vespa framework.
vespacppservingpythondata-science
lesters/langchain
Apr 2023 - Oct 2023
⚡ Building applications with LLMs through composability ⚡
Contributions:11 pushes, 2 branches in 5 months
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