# Luis Fernandez

> Founding Engineer

Location: San Francisco, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/luisfernandez

I’ve spent my career scaling backend systems that power millions of user interactions every day. These days, I’m building the world’s most robust testing platform for advanced robots at Parallax.

Some cool open-source side projects I've built: https://github.com/LF-Luis

## Work Experience
### Founding Engineer @ Parallax Worlds
Jan 2024 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States
Building the future of robotics testing.

### Software Development Engineer 2 @ Amazon
Jan 2023 – Jan 2024 | Palo Alto, California, United States
Building Amazon's LLM Chatbot Rufus, worked on building the Retrieval side of our RAG system, and then focused on innovative inference-output capabilities.

### Software Development Engineer 2 @ Amazon
Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | Santa Clara, California, United States
Alexa Shopping - Building AI/ML systems and services for Alexa voice shopping and purchasing.

### POWER 9 & 10 Firmware Engineer @ IBM
Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | Austin, Texas, United States
IBM POWER Systems, bootloader team
In the Hostboot Firmware team which contributes to OpenPOWER.
C++ firmware development in a RHE Linux environment.

### Undergraduate Applied Research @ J.J. Pickle Research Campus @ The University of Texas at Austin
Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | J. J. Pickle Research Campus, Austin, TX
Created rotary actuator prototypes, working alongside Dr. Delbert Tesar turning some of his previous research work into prototypes. This included:
- In-depth gearing design
- Shaft and casing design with structural integrity
- Bearings selection
- Compactness and shortest force-path
- Design with modularity in mind to fit into a modern wheelchair or hospital bed

Programmed and wrote brief on the need for advance software for in-depth gearing design using parametric maps. This was inspired by the detailed work done while creating the prototypes.

(CAD in Autodesk’s Inventor, Programmed in Swift and Matlab, some work available on Github)

### Software Developer Intern @ The University of Texas at Austin
Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | Perry Castañeda Library
Worked at Facilities and IT Infrastructure inside of the Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL)
- Build and deployed native MacOS apps for the new PCL Mac Media Lab
(Xcode using Objective-C, Swift, BASH)
- Build and deployed full-stack waitlist with email-notification web application for the Architecture Library at UT
(Visual Studio using C#, ASP.NET, JS, CSHTML, LINQ, SQL)
- Build and deployed a native Windows PC app for upgrading students’ printing cards
(Visual Studio using C#, .NET)

### Intern Research Assistant @ University of Texas at Dallas
Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Humanoid, Biorobotics and Smart Systems 800 W Campbell Rd Richardson, TX 75080
- Led project to animate artificial skin that is embedded with temperature and pressure sensors. 
    - Animated using silver coated nylon “muscle” actuators (a new breakthrough from the UT Dallas NanoTech Institute)
- CAD designed a skeleton for an anatomically correct robotic hand that was then covered with an artificial skin (silicone), it was used for testing arm prosthetic
- Supported graduate students in a variety of tasks such as CAD, programming, circuitry, prototyping, and testing.
    - Worked with different Arduino devices and off-the-shelf peripherals for prototyping and testing, all code was written in C++


## Education
### Bachelors of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering
The University of Texas at Austin


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/lf-luis
- Website: https://github.com/LF-Luis

---
Source: https://flows.cv/luisfernandez
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/luisfernandez/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-05