# Tim Bauman > Engineer at Surge AI Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/timbauman I'm working on fine tuning language models for helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty at Surge AI. We're building the world's highest quality model training data platform and have been involved in training some of the world's most advanced models. I conduct ML research to better serve our clients, and I build tooling to ensure that the work we deliver is high quality. In past roles, I built developer platforms that helped engineers manage the network traffic for hundreds of millions of mobile users, optimized routing shipments on ocean liners, scaled up the lab processes for COVID testing to deal with case surges, and researched adversarial training techniques for language models. I'm also interested in automating complicated logistical problems, scaling up software services and improving their reliability, and building effective and motivated teams. ## Work Experience ### Principal Software Engineer @ Surge AI Jan 2023 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States ➤ Leading the reinforcement learning environment engineering team ➤ Led data quality tooling, building from scratch data quality tools that are used to monitor and improve quality for every data point the company delivers as it grows to >$1.2B in revenue and beyond ➤ Built a system to match new workers on our platform with work, helping workers become active 5-10x faster ➤ Trained models to understand the impact of data quality on model performance ### ML Alignment Research Engineer @ Redwood Research Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | Berkeley, California, United States ➤ Conducted research that doubled a language model’s robustness to attacks through adversarial training, resulting in a NeurIPS 2022 publication. ➤ Fine tuned large language models based on deBERTa with custom EC2 experimentation platform and built language model-assisted adversarial attack tools with React, Flask, tailwind.css, dvc, Lambda Labs, and HuggingFace. ➤ Built a PyTorch-based framework for rapidly prototyping adversarial attacks and training for transformer language models and used it to discover “relaxed” adversarial attacks that made toy models robust to all known adversaries without degrading performance. ➤ Used cutting-edge interpretability tools to find new circuits in GPT-2 that extrapolate patterns and explained more than 90% of that behavior. ➤ Mentored two teams of researchers who studied a language model and identified new compositions of attention heads, akin to induction heads. ### Engineering Manager @ Curative Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco, California, United States ➤ Led a team of 5 to build data infrastructure with Celery and Redshift to submit millions of insurance claims worth hundreds of millions of dollars. ➤ Developed and maintained laboratory operations software in Django, TypeScript, React, GraphQL, and Postgres. ### Software Engineer @ Curative Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco, California, United States ➤ Increased COVID-19 test plating throughput by 40% by building and deploying a plating tool in React, Django, GraphQL, and SQLAlchemy on AWS. ➤ Led research, planning, and rollout across product, engineering, and lab operations to deploy the plating tool across all labs in weeks. ### Software Engineer @ Flexport Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area ➤ Led 6 engineers to develop a tool in Typescript to automate optimization of 80% of Flexport’s ocean shipment routing, saving core operations team members 4-8 hours a day and decreasing response times to customer-facing teams from 12-24 hours to 2-3 hours. ➤ Migrated to a Flask service to enable data scientists to use Coin-OR and pyomo to optimize pricing. Built data pipelines using dbt and Snowflake. ➤ Scaled the Ocean team’s processes to 12 people by mentoring senior and junior engineers and junior product managers and instituting postmortems, quarterly planning, software design reviews, improved oncall process, and regular metric reviews. ➤ With partner teams, planned a two-year migration to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) in Flow, Ruby on Rails, Java, PostgreSQL. ### Engineering Manager @ Facebook Jan 2016 – Jan 2019 | Menlo Park, CA ➤ Architected integration of Free Basics with Instagram across services (using Thrift, Python, Hack) to unlock 10s of millions of MAU. ➤ Migrated of our backend to enable version control and code review of configuration with Configerator, cutting outages by 70%. ➤ Constructed of a data pipeline on Scribe (akin to Kafka), dataswarm, Hadoop/HBase, and Presto/Hive to monitor and control per-request traffic usage for more than 500 million monthly active users with a few seconds of latency. Reduced p99 traffic abuse by more than 90%. ➤ Hired 8 new engineers and mentored junior, senior, and staff engineers to support their career growth. ➤ Drove roadmapping and vision for the team. Built relationships with product, infrastructure, and partnerships teams. ### Software Engineer @ Facebook Jan 2013 – Jan 2016 | Menlo Park, CA ➤ Tech lead for 4 senior engineers. We redesigned and rebuilt our traffic infrastructure in PHP/Hack, Javascript, Android, and Proxygen (C++/Lua) to be more efficient, reducing network overhead by about 60% and increasing Connectivity MAU growth by more than 20% (about 4 million/year). ### Software Engineering Intern @ Dimagi Inc. Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 | Cambridge, MA ### Summer Organizer @ Obama for America Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 ### Public Policy Intern @ Multnomah County Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 ### Software Engineering Intern @ Carrotmob Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 ### Lead Organizer @ Carrotmob Portland Jan 2009 – Jan 2009 ### ASE Intern @ Portland State University Jan 2008 – Jan 2008 ### ASE Intern @ Portland State University Jan 2006 – Jan 2006 ## Education ### A.B. in Princeton School of Public and International Affairs; Certificate in Applications of Computing Princeton University Jan 2009 – Jan 2013 ### Central Catholic High School Jan 2005 – Jan 2009 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tim-bauman-6b4bb513 - Website: http://www.tbauman.com/ --- Source: https://flows.cv/timbauman JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/timbauman/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22