# Nicholas Broad > All things transformers! 🚀 Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/nicholasbroad I am a machine learning engineer with 5+ years of experience in the transformers era. I love building with Hugging Face libraries, especially with transformers, datasets, accelerate, and optimum. While at Hugging Face, I've worked closely with 20+ companies to help build custom LLMs, utilize data efficiently, develop responsible and efficient ML practices, and deploy optimized models on a variety of hardware. I primarily focus on language-based applications, and I am proficient in pytorch and have a basic understanding in Tensorflow and Jax. I have actively participated on Kaggle since 2021 -- I have achieved the rank of Kaggle GrandMaster and am in the top 50 for discussions. My profile can be viewed here: https://www.kaggle.com/nbroad Additionally I have interests in teaching and learning in the most effective way possible. I have over 3 years of experience in teaching roles as a tutor, teaching assistant, and taiko (Japanese percussion) teacher. I am dedicated to always improving myself, and I'm currently committed to learning as much as I can about data science. I enjoy creating solutions that help people and save time. Some personal projects I worked on include an automated multiple choice sheet grader for teachers and an automated application-to-database handler for Meals on Wheels of Durham as a member of Durham's chapter of Code for America. keywords: data science, machine learning, NLP, NLU, REST, API, flask, AWS, Sagemaker, EC2, RDS, PostgreSQL, nginx, python, git, education, edtech, healthcare, dash, pytorch, transformers, GCP, Azure, GPU, TPU, MLops ## Work Experience ### Forward Deployed Engineer @ Together AI Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States ### ML Engineer @ Hugging Face Jan 2021 – Jan 2025 | San Francisco Bay Area Accelerating client's AI/ML projects: - Building custom LLMs - Utilizing GPUs/TPUs/HPUs/IPUs - Optimizing models for inference via distillation and ORT - Developing responsible, ethical practices - Using cloud infrastructure effectively ### Instructor: Machine Learning using Transformers @ Sphere Jan 2023 – Jan 2023 I am leading a course on using Transformers in Enterprises - specifically about pre-training large language models. ### Data Scientist @ GSK Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Area Developing NLP applications and capabilities to expedite medical voice-of-customer insight generation. Proficient at implementing solutions using nltk, gensim, spaCy, transformers, PyTorch, Flask, Dash, Redis, Docker, and Databricks for tasks such as classification, NER, topic modeling, clustering, emotion detection, semantic search, and summarization of unstructured text. ### Data Science Fellow @ SharpestMinds Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina Area • Built and deployed a web app that uses sentiment analysis (LSTMs and BERT) to measure political bias in the titles of news articles. (sentimentr.nmbroad.com) • Achieved 50% accuracy using LSTM and 64% using BERT on hand-labeled data for a 3-label classification task. • Created interactive web app with a title-analyzing RESTful API using Flask and hosting on AWS EC2 with web serving via nginx. • The app makes scheduled calls to major news providers’ APIs to retrieve recent article titles, and stores them in an AWS RDS PostgreSQL database for analysis. ### Academic and Test Prep Tutor @ AJ Tutoring Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area • Tutored over 30 students in middle and high school to improve their grades and SAT/ACT scores. • Tasked with grading tests by hand; developed automatic multiple choice grader to cut times by 60% and errors by 50%. Used OpenCV to scan and grade answer sheets for SAT/ACT practice exams. • Wrote a script to reduce administrative work by 30% by utilizing the billing company’s API to automatically bill routine clients instead of manually inputting. ### Research Assistant @ Stanford University Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | Stanford, California, United States • Researched materials and fabrication process for a heat-to-electricity converter via thermionic emission. • Designed and iterated through multiple fabrication runs to create micro-sized vacuum chambers using tools such as UV photolithography, reactive ion etching, wafer bonding, atomic layer deposition, and wet etching. • Characterized process using metrology tools such as optical and scanning electron microscopes and interferometers to assess quality of fabrication process. ### Financial Manager @ Stanford University Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | Stanford, California, United States • Managed a budget of over $75,000 for food and social expenses for over 30 students to ensure students have meals and events to promote healthy dialogue within the residence • Inherited debt from previous manager and increased reserves by $1,000 for the following year • Collaborated with 9 staff members to budget, organize, and host multiple social events per year to engage intentionally with students in building community within the residence ### Department of Energy Science Undergraduate Laboratory Intern @ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Livermore, California, United States Designed, fabricated, and tested new devices and materials for implantable, flexible micro electrode arrays for modulation of the nervous system. ### Undergraduate Researcher in Extreme Environment Microsystems Lab @ Stanford University Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Stanford, California, United States Interfaced graphene and ZnO nanorods on GaN UV photodetectors for improved responses. Competent at using UV lithography, SEM, FIB, and XRD tools. ## Education ### Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Electrical Engineering Stanford University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nicholas-m-broad --- Source: https://flows.cv/nicholasbroad JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/nicholasbroad/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-05