Nick Hill Email & Phone Number

Raleigh, Nc, Us

Armonk, New York, Ny, Us

• Built the back-end LLM inferencing platform that was released as the flagshipwatsonx.ai Gen-AI cloud service in July 2023, lauded by the CEO and head ofResearch as unprecedented in terms of Research time-to-market. • Deployed and supported highly successfully IBM-internal LLM inferencing service used by thousands of IBMers as a vehicle for other research and services. • Early significant contributor to the first and most prominent open source LLM inferencing engines - Hugging Face TGI and vLLM. • vLLM committer. Represent IBM in the vLLM community, supporting and coordinating contributions by others. • Drive collaboration across IBM Research in support of common goals - bridging efforts/workstreams and connecting the dots between different projects and teams. • Work as a conduit between Research and product teams in IBM and Red Hat; assisted with early Gen AI customer engagements. • Lead ongoing Gen AI inference engineering and optimization efforts - setting technical strategy, educating and enabling other team members.

Armonk, New York, Ny, Us

Conceived, designed and implemented much of the infrastructure underpinning IBM’s most successful AI Cloud offerings including IBM Watson Assistant and Natural Language Classifier services. Lead and mentor development teams. Build and support distributed, scalable, resilient production systems and components/libraries used within them. Consistent top performer and regular award recipient.• Designed and implemented back end Kubernetes-based engine for orchestrating self-service ML model lifecycles used by Watson Assistant, Natural Language Classifier and Discovery services – co-ordinates model training, retraining and deployment in a fault-tolerant manner.• Designed and implemented general-purpose mesh-based model serving platform now central to most Watson AI cloud services – manages hundreds of thousands of production models.• Generalized components with abstractions to enable seamless migration between changing underlying platform services – container scheduler, data stores, etc.• Create and maintain various low-level libraries used across multiple Watson cloud products – including a service discovery and RPC framework, java etcd client and utilities.

Armonk, New York, Ny, Us

Taking IBM Watson from gameshow to product. Applied performance analysis and engineering to parallelize and shrink room-sized question-answering system down to a single server, taking everyone by surprise and driving a fundamental change in architectural direction.Created high-performance concurrent runtime library for Apache UIMA NLP pipelines, onto which all commercial Watson QA pipelines were based. Re-implemented the core Apache UIMA 2.x library internals with a new approach that became the basis for UIMA 3.0.

Armonk, New York, Ny, Us

Technical lead for IBM Cloud Labs’ solutions architecture and development. Varied role included:• Leading distributed development team – full stack design and implementation of cloud-related solutions and proof-of-concept work (including front-end); Driving architecture, strategy, direction, innovation - Jump-starting technology initiatives.• Conduit between customers and product development teams; Key facilitator in transition of solutions and technology assets into product groups.• Partnering with other teams across IBM’s divisions – Systems, Research, Software brands; Enabling sales/deployment; Consultancy to IBM public compute cloud – advising on early technical direction, later with operational issues.• Customers – Tech lead for early cloud engagements with high-profile accounts (major telco, service provider and financial customers); Consultancy; Gathering, interpretation and negotiation of complex and changing requirements; Conducting briefings / workshops / demonstrations; Called in to resolve crit-sits in key engagements; Supported solution deployment “on the ground” at customer and IBM sites.

Armonk, New York, Ny, Us

Cloud Labs / High Performance On Demand Solutions team(details included in lead role description above)

Armonk, New York, Ny, Us

Partnered with leading edge clients to deliver high-volume web and on-demand operating environments.Performed performance benchmark and troubleshooting consultancy; Technically lead development and delivery of first-of-a-kind PoC solutions for customers based around self-service infrastructure provisioning (Cloud before it was called Cloud!)

Armonk, New York, Ny, Us

One of eight students chosen nationally, working in a team of four on research-based software project: an autonomic knowledge-management system based on Semantic Web concepts. Filed three patents.

Armonk, New York, Ny, Us

Software Engineer in small team integrating Voice over IP into an existing telephony product. Personally took over coding of a significant proportion of the software (in C). Chosen for IBM student Bursary scheme.Returned for subsequent summer internship (Jul 2002 - Sep 2002) – made responsible for the design and development of new SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) functionality. Liaised with vendors while evaluating their protocol stacks and delivered a full solution with one of the offerings.