Who am I?

My name is Nymph. I'm a senior infrastructure and backend engineer working on performance engineering and distributed systems, with a keen interest in mechanistic interpretability. Currently my main project is building steering vector, activation capture/storage, and activation conditiong steering support for vLLM in an effort to bridge the gap between research techniques and production code. Research won't ever get applied in production unless someone takes the time to make it fast and reliable, and I want to be a part of that.

Professionally I work at Whetstone Research where I own the indexing and data infrastructure. I have 6 years of experience managing distributed databases, ETL pipelines, and backend APIs. For several years I have been one of the main engineers on call to diagnose and fix problems in the prod data infrastructure to maintain correctness and uptime.

Outside of work I spend most of my spare time contributing to open source AI infrastructure. In addition to the vLLM steering vector support, I am also working on a verifiers environment and prime-rl training setup for RL on code optimization using mechanistic reward signals from perf traces instead of wall-clock time.

I also produce music and write code for microcontrollers to control LED strips/filament based on incoming audio. Right now I'm working on going from functional schematic to full layout for my first custom PCB using KiCad so I can make the setup more portable and do visuals at events.