natpat's comments

natpat | 7 months ago | on: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2025)

Hi, I’m Nathan. I’m a technical lead and software engineer with 8+ years of experience across ML infrastructure (LLMs/NLP), large-scale data systems, and backend development.

  Location: Vancouver, BC
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, Java, Kubernetes, FastAPI, PyTorch, Spark
  Résumé/CV: https://natpat.net/static/cv.pdf
  Email: nmtpatel7337 [at] gmail [dot] com
I’m looking for roles where I can apply my engineering skills to build impactful systems, while helping shape strong, collaborative teams and technical culture. I’ve led cross-functional teams of SWEs, AI researchers, and data scientists to develop and deploy complex ML systems - most recently, I led development of an RAG (LLM) search system used daily by thousands of RBC call center agents, saving millions annually. I’m looking to continue to grow in both engineering depth and team impact, while working with smart, curious people on meaningful problems.

natpat | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: I'm So Lonely

Or - accept that you'll be "inauthentic" for a while as you get back on your feet. Attract companionship and let it help you get back on the path to self acceptance. It's not a bad thing to rely on people and let them help you, even if you have to hide parts of yourself.

natpat | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2022)

Hi, I'm Nathan. I'm a SWE with experience in large scale data processing and backend, with a recent focus on ML/Natural Language Processing.

  Location: Vancouver, BC
  Remote: Yes, in Canada
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, Java, Spark, Kubernetes, FastAPI
  Résumé/CV: https://natpat.net/static/cv.pdf
  Email: nmtpatel7337 [at] gmail [dot] com
Whilst I am a strong technical contributor, I'm also interested in leadership, mentorship and learning. My favourite challenge recently has been leading a highly motivated and skilled team of SWE, AI Researchers and Data Scientists. I'm interested in a position where I can continue working with strong co-workers and help mould and lead strong, productive and happy teams. I also love learning and being surrounded by people from different backgrounds and fields to me. I've had exposure to bio-tech and NLP, but would also be interested in other ML fields, robotics, health, eco/green energy, and probably more.

I'm also very interested in game development, mainly as a hobby - see https://natpat.net/games. Would be very open to roles in that sector too!

Sadly, I can only accept roles that would be able to provide me with a Canadian Work Permit, which likely excludes many US-only based companies.

natpat | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2021)

Hi, I'm Nathan. I'm a SWE with experience in large scale data processing and backend, with a recent focus on ML/Natural Language Processing.

  Location: Vancouver, BC
  Remote: Yes, in Canada
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, Java, Spark, Kubernetes, FastAPI
  Résumé/CV: https://natpat.net/static/cv.pdf
  Email: nmtpatel7337 [at] gmail [dot] com
Whilst I am a strong technical contributor, I'm also interested in leadership, mentorship and learning. My favourite challenge recently has been leading a highly motivated and skilled team of SWE, AI Researchers and Data Scientists. I'm interested in a position where I can continue working with strong co-workers and help mould and lead strong, productive and happy teams. I also love learning and being surrounded by people from different backgrounds and fields to me. I've had exposure to bio-tech and NLP, but would also be interested in other ML fields, robotics, health, eco/green energy, and probably more.

I'm also very interested in game development, mainly as a hobby - see https://natpat.net/games. Would be very open to roles in that sector too!

Sadly, I can only accept roles that would be able to provide me with a Canadian Work Permit, which likely excludes many US-only based companies.

natpat | 4 years ago | on: An oral history of Bank Python

Completely off topic - but I love the aesthetic of the post. "Vanilla HTML" is a design that isn't used enough. It's something I tried to apply to my personal blog, but I think it's been done much better here.

natpat | 4 years ago | on: Sharing learnings about our image cropping algorithm

> One of our conclusions is that not everything on Twitter is a good candidate for an algorithm, and in this case, how to crop an image is a decision best made by people.

This seems like it should have been a foregone conclusion. What was the driving force in the first place to think cropping images with an AI model was desirable? Seems like ML was a solution looking for a problem here, and I'm glad they've realised that.

natpat | 4 years ago | on: Searching the web for under $1000/month

> What do you mean by search ?

Search maybe is too strong a word - "lookup" is probably more correct. I have a couple of identifiers for each document, from which I want to retrieve the full doc.

I'm not sure what you mean by running custom code on the data. I usually do some kind of transformation afterwards.

I didn't find anything either, which is why I was wondering if I was searching for the wrong thing.

natpat | 4 years ago | on: Searching the web for under $1000/month

This is super interesting. I've recently also been working on a similar concept: we have a reasonable amount (in the terabytes) of data, that's fairly static, that I need to search fairly infrequently (but sometimes in bulk). A solution we came up with was a small , hot, in memory index, that points to the location of the data in a file on S3. Random access of a file on S3 is pretty fast, and running in an EC2 instance means latency is almost nil to S3. Cheap, fast and effective.

We're using some custom Python code to build a Marisa Trie as our index. I was wondering if there were alternatives to this set up?

natpat | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2021)

Hi, I'm Nathan. I'm a SWE with experience in backend and large scale data processing, with a recent focus on ML/Natural Language Processing. Looking for an opportunity to relocate to Vancouver.

  Location: Currently London, looking for Vancouver
  Remote: Don't mind
  Willing to relocate: Yes, to Vancouver!
  Technologies: Python, Java, Spark, Kubernetes, FastAPI
  Résumé/CV: https://natpat.net/static/cv.pdf
  Email: nmtpatel7337 [at] gmail [dot] com
Whilst I am a strong technical contributor, I'm also interested in leadership, mentorship and learning. My favourite challenge recently has been leading a highly motivated and skilled team of SWE, AI Researchers and Data Scientists. I'm interested in a position where I can continue working with strong co-workers and help mould and lead strong, productive and happy teams.

I also love learning and being surrounded by people from different backgrounds and fields to me. I've had exposure to bio-tech and NLP, but would also be interested in other ML fields, robotics, health, eco/green energy, and probably more.

I'm also very interested in game development, mainly as a hobby - see https://natpat.net/games. Would be very open to roles in that sector too!

page 1