Isaiah Cornelius Smith

ML engineer. Tampa, FL. Remote-first.

Dartmouth linguistics, then five years building software. Currently AI engineering at a global bank: an internal skills platform, MCP tooling, and agents. Before that, retrieval: I rescued a stalled RAG experiment and took it from non-functional to ready for next steps. On the side, a language-learning platform I build solo, front to back, for my own personal use.

Selected work

PolyglotSRS

Personal project, active use

A spaced-repetition language platform I build solo, front to back, for my own language learning. Answers are graded by a per-language NLP backend rather than by string match: Arabic never fails an answer purely for missing diacritics but still catches a wrong root pattern, Turkish applies Turkish casing rules so a correct answer typed in caps is not marked wrong, Russian knows aspect pairs. Claude-powered tutors coach from the learner's own failure history.

  • FastAPI
  • asyncpg
  • Supabase
  • React
  • TypeScript
  • Claude API
  • FSRS-5

Sole builder, for personal use and language learning, not a product. Live and invite-only: request access and I'll approve it. Grammar paths seeded across every documented language, roughly 4,600 drills, with ~500 backend and ~95 frontend tests in CI.

Request access

Citi Coding Workshop

Open source, Apache-2.0, active

An open-source engineering workshop published under Citi's GitHub organization. Participants build a full team-management application on AWS serverless. I am a founding member and one of five named authors, and I contributed the Terraform and AWS serverless deployment tooling used by every participant: multi-region Lambda deployment, environment generation, and the local dev-start scripts.

  • Terraform
  • AWS Lambda
  • S3
  • CloudFront
  • RDS
  • Shell
  • Python
  • React

Still active, and the one piece of my work at Citi that is public.

Source

All work and projects

Receipts

  • Rescued a stalled RAG experiment non-functional to ready for next steps
  • Engineering-health platform 50 to 94 indicators, 100+ teams
  • PolyglotSRS 14 languages, 500+ tests in CI
  • Open source under Citi named author, Apache-2.0

In five lines

  1. Dartmouth, B.A. Linguistics, 2018.
  2. Hack Reactor immersive in 2022, after building software for a family business from 2021.
  3. Citi from 2023: engineering-health metrics for 100+ teams.
  4. Into Citi's AI organization in January 2025: an internal skills platform, MCP, agents.
  5. Continually builds side projects to grow skills: the furthest along is a personal language-learning platform.

Experience

Citi: AVP, Applications Development Senior Programmer (ML Engineer), AI organization

January 2025 to present

  • Builds skills-as-a-service offerings: AI capabilities packaged for engineering teams across the bank to download and use, plus skill-generation tooling, with MCP and security integration underneath. Also works on skill-based agents across multiple media, and on text-to-speech tooling including podcasting.
  • Works as an embedded engineer: deployed into other engineering teams to help them adopt and ship AI offerings.
  • Builds agents on Google ADK, Citi's standardized agent framework, including agents that help engineers hold to 12-factor-agent principles.
  • Rescued a stalled RAG experiment so it could begin production steps, rebuilding retrieval on a FAISS vector index and taking it from non-functional to ready for next steps. Owned most of the backend.
  • Helped build an internal LLM evaluation tool using DeepEval, working the bias-evaluation side, with models tested against standardized benchmarks.
  • Delivered adoption recommendations across 7+ AI/ML platforms and ML-architecture guidance to roughly 49 teams, with hands-on implementation support for five. Rated Exemplary, the highest rating, in 2025.
  • Founding member and named author of Citi's open-source Coding Workshop, contributing the Terraform and AWS serverless deployment tooling used by every participant.

Citi: Applications Development Programmer, Developer Services

January 2023 to December 2024

  • Led the DORA++ engineering-health platform, expanding tracking from 50 to 94 indicators across 100+ engineering teams: deployment frequency, change-failure rate, and MTTR.
  • Built an AHR-JIRA analytics connector in Python, delivering proof of concept to MVP before enterprise API access existed.
  • Led the Developer Manifesto tracking system measuring CI/CD and code-quality adoption across 100+ teams. Rated Exceeded Expectations and nominated to the E3 Engineering Leadership Program.

Freelance: Software Developer

2022 to 2023

  • Cut client e-commerce response times by roughly 80% with NGINX load balancing, and optimized a PostgreSQL ETL path from 23ms to 5ms.

Contact

Best reached at [email protected].