Val Fajardo
Principal AI Engineer & Researcher AI & Data Leadership Team
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolVal Fajardo is a Principal AI Engineer and researcher with a PhD in Statistics from the University of Waterloo, combining deep theoretical grounding in probability and statistics with hands-on ML and software engineering across startups and industry. With roles ranging from founding engineer at LlamaIndex to AI leadership at The Carlyle Group and applied NLP work at the Vector Institute, he builds production-ready models that translate complex data into actionable finance and enterprise insights. He has a track record of leading ML teams and skunkworks labs, mentoring students and practitioners, and teaching large undergraduate classes—evidence of a rare mix of research rigor and communication skill. Comfortable shipping code and proofs, Val’s background in both academia and high-velocity product environments lets him bridge cutting-edge research and pragmatic deployment.
4 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MSc), Statistics, Master of Science (MSc), Statistics at Brock UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Statistics, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Statistics at University of Waterloo
Github Skills (38)
vector-database10
llm10
fine-tuning10
data-structures10
gpt10
application10
anchor9
federated-learning9
rust9
nlp9
threaded8
python8
deep-learning8
machine-learning8
dataframes8
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
VectorInstitute/fed-rag
Mar 2025 - Apr 2025
A framework for federated fine-tuning of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems.
Contributions:11 reviews, 75 PRs, 120 pushes in 19 days
deep-learningfederated-learningllmsmachine-learningrag
nerdai/react-the-complete-guide
Mar 2022 - Feb 2023
Contributions:262 pushes, 1 branch in 10 months
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