Auckland
I’m Luke Simmons, a solutions engineer in Auckland. I build local-first software and run it on my own hardware, using modern AI to move fast while I make the calls on what gets built and what ships. Everything here is written up as an honest build log, including the time I deleted a model because it was making results worse. Before software I trained as an audio engineer at SAE, and fifteen years of mixing live sound — which I still do — is where my instincts for real-time systems come from. I’m looking for AI/ML, solutions engineering, or technical product roles, and I’m just as happy behind a mixing desk. Auckland or remote.
local model serving (Ollama, llama.cpp — up to 671B MoE), LLM gateway & tiered routing (LiteLLM), citation-grounded RAG, training fundamentals (PyTorch/CUDA, GPT-2-class from scratch), TTS & lip-sync pipelines, agent orchestration with verification gates
live-sound mixing, audio/video production, lighting and stage tech — SAE-trained, 15 years behind live desks and still active on one today
Python (primary), Rust (Tauri, Bevy), JavaScript/TypeScript, SQL
Flask, FastAPI, Node.js, Tauri, Docker/WSL2, REST & OpenAI-compatible APIs, SQLite (FTS5), PostgreSQL, Git, security hygiene (scoped keys, secret management), local-first & audited design
Sole designer-operator of a ~25-service self-hosted AI platform — a security-tiered LLM gateway, frontier-scale local model serving, citation-grounded AI products, and the Rust desktop control plane that runs the fleet.
Live audio/video mixing and lighting; earlier Manukau City Baptist (2010–2018) — about fifteen years of live sound in total.
25 hours a week held six-plus years alongside study — customer-facing service every shift.
SAE Institute — Diploma in Audio Engineering (NZQA L5) · Carey Baptist College — Diploma in Applied Theology (NZQA L6) · Codecademy — Software Engineering (ongoing)
A private, offline academic hub — around 190 subjects with AI-generated degrees and cited field-guide essays. A small local model authors the knowledge separately from synthesising it, which keeps answers grounded and near hallucination-free.
A structured, fully-cited research project mapping New Zealand's policy challenges — problems, claims, drivers, and rival camps — as a typed entity graph across all 16 regions. Over 1,300 sourced claims, each with a confidence and verification rating, plus cross-region pattern analysis.
A discovery game where progression lives in your head — wander a university, collect cited facts, and uncover the hidden connection the departments never mention. A knowledge base reframed as a game.
A zero-shot clone of my own voice built from a single short reference clip, used to narrate videos and a read-along audiobook.
Consilience reimagined on an OSRS-style engine — a Rust prototype with a 600 ms game tick, tile pathfinding, and a skilling loop.
A desktop supervisor that starts, stops, and health-checks every local service I run — the registry-driven console this site's design language came from.