Evan O'Leary

Evan O'Leary

AI engineer in London. I build agents and the benchmarks that keep them honest: for wet-lab automation, GPU/TPU kernels, hardware design and protein models.

Grand winner · Oct 2026
Anthropic Science HackathonText2WetLab. Track 2 + Modal prize, 250 builders
1st place · Aug 2026
VLGE Hackathon, San FranciscoIgnis: RL wildfire suppression
2nd place · May 2026
Poolside × NVIDIA Research HackLaguna-Dense CUDA kernel model
Merged PR · 2026
Sakana AI ShinkaEvolveVerilog/RTL support, 27/45 designs beat human

Featured work

Text2WetLab trailer: OT-2 robot running an agent-written protocol
Oct 2026 – present · PhysicalAIBenchmarks

Text2WetLab

🏆 Anthropic Science Hackathon grand winnerOpentrons OT-2MuJoCoHarbor

A benchmark that tests whether AI agents can turn the methods sections of published papers into executable liquid-handling robot protocols, aimed at science's reproducibility crisis.

  • 11 expert-annotated tasks, growing to 25 toward publication
  • Graded on wet-lab correctness the simulator doesn't check: mixing, bead carry-over, well volumes
  • Now working with UniteLabs and the NHS to take it to production
Ignis: unmanaged fire spread vs. RL agent suppression
Aug 2026 · VLGE Hackathon, San Francisco

Ignis: RL for wildfire suppression

🥇 1st placeGymnasiumNumPyCEM / PPO

A fast fire-spread simulator and RL sandbox, built in 6 hours. An air-tanker agent learns where to drop water. The trained agent saves about 98% of fuel, against 42% with no intervention. Judged by researchers from NVIDIA, Project Prometheus and NASA.

  • 2D wind-driven, 3D terrain (fire climbs uphill) and indoor voxel buildings
  • Pip-installable Gymnasium environments, listed via a PR to Farama's Gymnasium
Laguna-Dense training pipeline overview
May 2026 · Poolside × NVIDIA Research Hackathon

Laguna-Dense: a 3B CUDA kernel generator

🥈 2nd placeMoE → denseGRPOvLLM

Distilled Poolside's 33B, 256-expert Laguna XS.2 MoE into a 3B fully dense model. Then SFT and GRPO on the Sakana AI CUDA Engineer archive for KernelBench-style kernel optimisation, with a vLLM engine for fast pass@k evaluation.

PPA score climbing over generations of evolutionary search
2026 · Open source

Evolving Verilog with ShinkaEvolve

Merged into Sakana AIVerilogYosysformal equivalence

Added Verilog/SystemVerilog support to Sakana AI's evolutionary program search, gated by Yosys SAT-equivalence checking. Evolved designs beat the human reference on 27 of 45 RTLLM v2.0 designs for area, depth and power. The best result scored 175 against the reference's 100.

Benchmarks & research

PallasBench

The first benchmark for LLM-generated JAX Pallas kernels on TPU and GPU. Three difficulty levels, correctness-gated speedup scoring against JAX baselines, robustness filters, CI and a Hugging Face dataset.

JAXPallasTPU

JaxBench

KernelBench, except the thing being optimised is JAX itself. Agents rewrite C++/CUDA hot paths and XLA passes, JAX is rebuilt, and the score is the speedup of the real library, gated on correctness.

C++XLAShinkaEvolve

LewyGym

A ProteinGym-compatible benchmark for zero-shot variant effect prediction across the Parkinson's gene panel (SNCA, LRRK2, GBA, PRKN, PINK1…). Finding: ESM-2's signal inverts on SNCA, and larger models make it worse.

protein LMsESM-2Parkinson's

ESM-2 650M inference optimisation

Reproduces the published ProteinGym baseline for ESM-2 650M (ρ = 0.414) on Modal A100s, pinned to exact SHAs. Compares masked-marginal, batched and single-pass scoring, followed by kernel-level work in Mojo, CuteDSL, Pallas and quantisation.

PyTorchModalProteinGym

Erdős Math Emporium

Ten parallel ShinkaEvolve instances attack open Erdős problems, with Lean 4 proof verification and a live constellation UI. Built at the {Tech: Europe} London AI Hackathon.

Lean 4Next.jsGemini

Alxandria

An autonomous research agent that finds related work, writes code and runs experiments on Kaggle. 3rd place (£1,000) at the Perplexity AI Hackathon, London.

Perplexity SonarFastAPIReact

Experience

Sep 2025 – now

JPMorgan Chase & Co.

AI Engineer / Backend Engineer · London
  • Engineering lead for a firmwide data-engineering agent covering discovery, lineage, data quality, and ETL generation on Databricks and Snowflake. Demoed to the Operating Committee.
  • Grew the team from 2 to 10. Cut one line of business's pipeline cycle from 2 days to 3 hours. Marked for early promotion.
  • Built the agent eval harness with regression gating on every release, DSPy prompt optimisation, and MCP tool suites for Databricks, Snowflake, Redshift, Athena and Glue.
2024 – 2025

Emenate

Founder · AI video understanding · Bath / London
  • Vision-language models for retail loss prevention, taken to a live in-store pilot in Bath that was sold door-to-door.
  • RAG over video-caption embeddings on AWS with Qdrant, and a Ray cluster for distributed video inference.
Jun – Aug 2024

JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Backend Developer Intern · Kafka Streams, Kubernetes
  • Consolidated the Nutmeg Direct Debits Kafka Streams topology from 7 subtopologies into 1, cutting latency and 1.5k lines of code.
Jun 2023 – Jun 2024

Nomura

Full-stack Developer / SRE · London
  • Trade-data services on KDB+, gRPC APIs, and ML feature pipelines and a model registry for the desk.
Jun – Aug 2022

Propflo

Full-stack Developer · PropTech start-up · Bristol
  • A mortgage-ability API over a dataset of 29M+ properties, plus Next.js/FastAPI buyer-readiness features.

All projects

Robotics & RL
3D render of a Golden Gate assembly protocol on the OT-2

opentrons-mujoco-viz

A 3D MuJoCo renderer for Opentrons OT-2 protocols, driven by opentrons_simulate logs. It powers the Text2WetLab videos.

Ignis 3D terrain fire

Ignis: 3D terrain & indoor

Slope-coupled fire spread on heightmaps, and voxel buildings where fire fills rooms and crosses doorways, scored by an eval harness.

Project Automaton

Intrinsic's AI for Industry Challenge: cable-insertion policies in MuJoCo, Isaac Lab, Gazebo and ROS 2, with SO-101 tooling.

ROS2 Summer School, FH Aachen

Top of the postgraduate cohort. Autonomous navigation following AprilTags, plus fine-tuned YOLOv8 bottle detection in Nav2 and Isaac Sim.

RobotLearningMonolith

Coursework and experiments for the SO-101 robot-learning course on LeRobot.

Deep RL for continuous control

University of Bath RL unit (87%): PyTorch implementations of deep RL agents across continuous-control environments.

Kernels, compilers & evolutionary search
Collage of evolved Verilog design results

RTLLM × ShinkaEvolve results

Per-design PPA results, reward-hack audits and figures for the evolved Verilog work.

Laguna MoE expert activation plot

Laguna expert co-activation

Expert-activation analysis across code datasets that informed the MoE → dense densification.

ShinkaEvolve × CARE-PD

Evolutionary program search on CARE-PD, a Parkinson's gait dataset.

Upstream contributions

Merged Verilog support in Sakana AI's ShinkaEvolve and a Gymnasium environment listing, plus working forks of JAX, PyTorch, ESM, openevolve and LeRobot.

Agents, video & applied AI

HoneyPot

A UK scam-call honeypot. AI voice personas waste scammers' time, and the transcripts are categorised to publish trends that protect vulnerable people.

Project Halo

Real-time video risk detection for suicide prevention. Won Tech for Good at BathHack 2022 and was later extended with suicidology researchers.

Medication voice agent

A voice agent and carer dashboard for elderly medication reminders. Won 2 prizes at the AI Engine Hackathon (Best Use of ACI.dev, Largest System Built).

Mówka · HackAvengers Warsaw

Team hackathon project.

Arcadeus

An Excel add-in for M&A and private-equity financial modelling.

Video-MME long-video samples

Hardest long-video samples per category, used for Emenate's VLM research.

Earlier work & small builds
Private work

Education & fellowships

2021 – 2025

University of Bath

BSc Computer Science with Placement Year · First-Class Honours
Sep 2025

FH Aachen: ROS2 Robotics Summer School

Top of the postgraduate cohort
2026

Silicon Valley Fellowship · Y Combinator Startup School Paris

Fellow (~2% acceptance) · selected participant
2024 – 2026

Perplexity Business AI Fellowship · Acceler8 (Bath)

Sessions with Jensen Huang, Aravind Srinivas, Ali Ghodsi · mentored by Christian Owens (Paddle)

Skills

Languages
Python, Scala, TypeScript, SQL, C++, CUDA, Verilog, Bash
ML & AI
PyTorch, JAX/Pallas, vLLM, GRPO, DSPy, RAG & vector search, Hugging Face, MCP, agent evaluation
RL & robotics
Gymnasium, Stable-Baselines3, MuJoCo, Opentrons, ROS2, NVIDIA Isaac Sim
Data & cloud
PySpark, Databricks, Snowflake, Kafka, AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Ray, Modal
Hardware / EDA
Yosys, ABC, Icarus Verilog, formal equivalence