Ernesto Rivera
Bridging Tech and Industry: Innovating Solutions, Inspiring Change
Career
Professional Experience
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Software Developer, IBM
Jul 2026 - Present | San Jose, CA
Contribute to a production webhook-driven AI-agent pipeline in watsonx Orchestrate, streamlining QA intake and containment review while reducing manual handoffs. Proposed and built a webhook simulator that cut per-case test time from 45 minutes to 3 minutes for every end-to-end permutation ahead of a product launch, which led to being elected to architect a from-scratch E2E validation framework for the broader team.
Founder, Cantena
Oct 2025 - Apr 2026 | Remote
Started in agentic coding and search tooling for enterprises, reaching state-of-the-art performance within a day of building. Recognized a stronger edge in construction and pivoted to pre-construction workflows, onboarding 11 construction firms within 3 weeks. Presented twice to Y Combinator and interviewed with Pear VC. Read the decision memo and pre-construction memo.
Software Engineer Intern, Wayfair
Summer 2025 | Boston, MA
Full-stack development on fintech microservices using PHP, TypeScript, and Apollo GraphQL. Built and optimized landing pages, improved SEO, implemented end-to-end testing with Jest, and ensured cross-browser accessibility compliance. Monitored production systems with Datadog and Kibana.
Data Architecture Engineer, Whiting-Turner
May 2024 - Oct 2024 | Irvine, CA
Restructured a 1B+ data point database into job site-specific systems using Azure (Cosmos DB, SQL, IoT Hub, Stream Analytics), cutting query times by 80%. Led development of a task management system that reduced scheduling delays by 12%. Consulted on AI adoption for construction workflows and mentored junior interns.
Founding Engineer, MyTA
Jul 2023 - Mar 2024 | Remote
Built an AI-powered educational chatbot using Meta AI's Nougat for high-accuracy OCR and Pinecone for vectorized data handling, improving content delivery by 50%. Integrated professorial materials into personalized student support systems. Collaborated with 14+ university AI boards to drive platform adoption.
Research Assistant, GLOB~S Lab
Jan 2024 - May 2024 | Boston, MA
Analyzed a 32GB US Patent Directory dataset to uncover disaster-driven innovation trends around Hurricane Katrina. Built scalable data pipelines with NumPy and Dask on shared computing clusters. Merged patent data to inform post-disaster policy and strategy.
AI Software Engineer, Whiting-Turner
May 2023 - Jun 2023 | Irvine, CA
Developed OCR/KIE applications for cloud deployment using Mindee's OCR, FastAPI, and React Native. Achieved 25x reduction in transcription time by automating on-field form processing with OCR and LLM. Spearheaded AI adoption by building MVPs and presenting proof-of-concept documentation to senior management.
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Hackathons
Hackathon Projects
$65,000+ in prizes across 10+ hackathons
Church & AI 2024, Best Concept
$15,000 Prize
Led creation of Generosity, an AI-driven platform to unlock $50B in annual church donations. Built AI-powered donor-cause matching algorithms that increased donation growth by 53%. Used Digital Twin technology to optimize initiative success across large member bases with a real-time feedback loop and dynamic AI dashboard.
Church & AI 2023, Best Technology
$50,000 Prize
Built an AI-powered MetaHuman backend using Inworld AI and Unreal Engine for immersive 3D interactions. Pioneered personalized AI faith-based counselors, reducing costs by 100x. Crafted the technical infrastructure and business strategy for Gloo's collaboration.
Cornell Health Hackathon
Finalist, 2023
Developed an AI-powered VR/AR therapy app to help individuals overcome phobias. Integrated GPT-3's API to create personalized prompts for immersive 360-degree environments using Stable Diffusion.
NASA Space Apps
Global Nominee, 2022
Engineered an AI system to analyze 22,500+ datasets from public NASA archives. Implemented GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion to make complex datasets accessible to the general public and researchers, earning global recognition.
Side Builds
Personal Projects
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Swarm
Browser-native distributed LLM training
H100s are hard to come by for personal use, and it turns out the pool of friends willing to lend compute is much bigger than the pool comfortable using a terminal. Built a browser-native distributed GPT-2 trainer that partitions transformer layers across GPU-backed Chrome workers using TensorFlow.js, WebRTC, and 1F1B pipeline parallelism. Validated a 774M-parameter GPT-2 Large model across 6 Chrome workers in 3 AWS regions, using DiLoCo and SparseLoCo to cut synchronization traffic by ~65x, plus gradient checkpointing and 8-bit Adam to reduce activation memory by ~60% and optimizer-state memory by 4x. Check it out.
Agent Checkout Proof
Is your AI agent ready to pay?
A wallet-spendability scanner that checks whether a product page gives an AI shopping agent everything it needs to transact safely: item identification, all-in pricing, visible payment methods, a clear risk/refund policy, and a verifiable record of what it found. Check it out.
OCR Digit Classifier
Machine learning
Custom KNN model for handwritten digit recognition on MNIST, achieving 95% accuracy through optimized preprocessing and feature extraction. Built a real-time GUI with Python, Tkinter, PIL, and NumPy.
AI Interview Bot
Full-stack AI application
Real-time interview prep tool using OpenAI, Flask, Next.js, and WebSockets. Provides feedback, grades responses, and tailors questions to specific industries, companies, and job positions.