justinlloyd

há 9 mesesdiscuss

    I'm a seasoned generalist with deep focus in certain areas such as game development, performance engineering, systems engineering, low-level engineering and embedded software.

    Location: Los Angeles, CA or San Francisco, CA or London, UK
    Remote: Yes, hybrid considered for the right money.
    Willing to relocate: No

    Technologies: kernel drivers, systems engineering, video games, AI, LLMs, caching, graphics, rendering, assembly languages, generative AI, heavy focus on back-end systems, and to a lesser degreee, full-stack.

   - Languages: C++, C, C#, Go, Rust, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Lua, many others.
   - Backend: node, FastAPI, Django, PostgreSQL, mySQL, RocksDB, GraphQL, SQLite.
   - Engines: DumpsterFire, UnrealEngine, Unity3D.
   - Platforms: Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Linux, SONY PS2/3/4, XBOX360/One, Switch, embedded, web
   - Frontend: Next, React, Vue, Pixi
   - DevOps/Cloud: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, VMs, Vagrant, VMWare, TeamCity, Jenkins, CI/CD
   - AI/ML: Model training/tuning, LoRa, RAGs, PyTorch, TensorFlow, SciKit, OpenCV, many others.
   - LLM Integrations: OpenAI, Gemini, Claude plus many others, local and cloud.

    Résumé/CV: https://justin-lloyd.com/ (PDF at the bottom of the page)
    Email: [email protected]

    MSc in CompSci and MSc in AI/Robotics and an MBA

    20+ years of experience in performance critical systems engineering, video game development, embedded (C/C++/Rust/Asm), low-level engineering & AI, full stack and high performance backends, leading and managing multiple teams.

    Open to full time or contract but prefer contract.

justinlloyd

há 9 mesesdiscuss

SEEKING WORK

    I'm a seasoned generalist with deep focus in certain areas such as game development, performance, systems engineering, low-level engineering and embedded software.

    Location: Los Angeles, CA or San Francisco, CA or London, UK
    Remote: Yes, hybrid considered for the right money.
    Willing to relocate: No

    Technologies: C++, C, C#, Go, Rust, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Unreal Engine, Unity3D, iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, kernel drivers, systems engineering, video games, AI, LLMs, RAGs, Redis, caching, graphics, rendering, assembly languages, generative AI, heavy focus on back-end systems and to a lesser degreee, full-stack.

    Résumé/CV: https://justin-lloyd.com/ (PDF at the bottom of the page)
    Email: [email protected]

    MSc in CompSci and MSc in AI/Robotics and an MBA

    20+ years of experience in performance critical systems engineering, video game development, embedded (C/C++/Rust/Asm), low-level engineering & AI, full stack and high performance backends, leading and managing multiple teams.

    Open to full time or contract but prefer contract.

justinlloyd

há 10 mesesdiscuss

You can certainly do that, but then your Samsung refrigerator will not acknowledge the water filter inserted into it and refuse to dispense water or make ice.

This is an actual thing.

justinlloyd

há 4 anosdiscuss

So interestingly to get multiple RTX 3090 cards using NVLINK you really need the blower style, which NVidia recently stopped making in the consumer line, otherwise you are fighting thermal properties and getting in to exotic cooling solutions. And you also get in to placement in slots on the motherboard on three-slot cards. And then you get into the number of PCIe PSU connectors on most supplies. You also get in to weird corner cases of four way NVLINK on 3090's acting as a "single card" but four way NVLINK on RTX A5000 is still independent cards as far as the OS goes. Regarding NVLINK, 3090 cards only support NVLINK (NVL 3.0 IIRC), rather than NVSWITCH. With NVLINK/NVSWITCH, with two RTX A5000 cards I get a total of 48GB of usable RAM for storing the machine learning models, and so on for multiple cards in the RTX A5K & A6K & AX00 line. But with the consumer cards, even though each card has, e.g. 12GB of RAM on them, your deep learning model is also limited to 12GB of RAM, no matter how many 3090 cards you put in. You're also limited to a maximum of four 3090 cards in total, whereas with the NVLINK & NVSWITCH on the professional grade cards, you are limited only by how many cards you can stuff in your data center - technically it is 16 GPUs on a single switch IIRC, things get funky with the fabric once you progress beyond 16 GPUs on a single switch but that's outside of the scope of this conversation. I may also have some details wrong, my brain is a little fuzzy afer dinner.

justinlloyd

há 4 anosdiscuss

Yes, we're very much taking a distributed, multi-threaded approach, but at the same time, the distributed parts are still local to the user.

justinlloyd

há 4 anosdiscuss

We are not creating a custom OS at this time. We have to be aware of the limits of what we can achieve given the size of our team and the desire to actually get to market in a timely fashion. That said, there's heavy customization of the OS we are using, along with some bare metal "OS? Where we're going we don't need no steenking OS" work. We're more focused on the h/w, the UI and UX that interfaces between the h/w and the user, and the graphics pipeline.

justinlloyd

há 4 anosdiscuss

Sounds like it will run circles around my Indigo2 R10K in the workshop. What do you do with all that power?

justinlloyd

há 4 anosdiscuss

ECC RAM, different cooling setup (blower vs side fans), very different thermal characteristics, 24GB or 48GB, more bus width usually, optimized paths for data load & unload, GPU interconnects for direct GPU to GPU communication, shareable vGPUs between VMs, GPU store & halt, h/w support for desktop state, GPU state hand-off to another machine. It isn't just a "more memory" kind of thing.

justinlloyd

há 4 anosdiscuss

Top-of-the-line 512GB LRDIMM DDR4 will run you about $2,500 before tax if you buy name brand Samsung. I know this because that is what is in both of my dual Xeon workstations. It gets pricey when you go through Dell or HP of course.

justinlloyd

há 4 anosdiscuss

Well dual XEON SP2 CPUs, multiple RTX A5000 GPUs, 30TB of SSD storage, 512GB of RAM and dual BlackMagic quad-input 4K capture cards can get you pretty darn close when it comes to your computer vision work.

justinlloyd

há 4 anosdiscuss

I am currently working with a hardware start-up, that happens to have "some monies" in the bank to deliver what we need. And if I was asked to describe how the culture inside the company feels, I would say "like the early days of NeXT." There's money here to do what we want, there's technically smart guys in the room, nothing is off the table in terms of what we're willing to try, we have a vision of what we want to build, nobody is being an architecture astronaut, all of us have shipped product before and know what it takes.

Where I am going with all this is that what we're trying to build, the consumer grade hardware to run it won't exist for two more years so we're having to use really beefy workstations in our day-to-day work. Not quite PARC level of built-from-scratch customization, but not exactly cheap consumer grade desktops either.

justinlloyd

há 5 anosdiscuss

I am at the same point in my career. I don't interview. I have a conversation with the person who wants to hire me. I've had two formal job interviews in the past 14 years, both at a FANG. Did not enjoy the interview experience at all. Got offers for both, and turned down both offers.

justinlloyd

há 5 anosdiscuss

On LinkedIn, when approached, and I am approached very often: My very first question is: "What is the compensation range for this position?"

And if it is below what I am seeking, I say "Thank you for making me aware of this opportunity. At the compensation range you stated it is a hard pass from me. If you can come back with a realistic number I might be open to a discussion. Good luck in your continuing candidate search."

Or if they ask me what I want, I say: "I'm currently making $230k base. Can you come up with a number higher than that which would convince me to move from a job I am happy with?"

It quickly removes the time wasters and the starry eyed dreamers and the cheap skates, and the people who are serious, then we have a conversation and see where it leads. And I have plenty of conversations every month. Yes, it's effective. It's a business negotiation, and the person on the other side of the conversation either understands that inherently or is trying to convince me that my labour is worth less.

justinlloyd

há 6 anosdiscuss

Look up Thomas Edison University, which will let you test out of many classes, transfer in other (US) college credit, does offer PLA credit (though that isn't as easy as just studying for and taking an exam). Also OpenClassrooms, which is project based, and offers many options for Bachelor level diplomas through a non-traditional route with many of the diplomas backed by reputable European universities such as Ecole de Paris and Lyon University.

Also check out degreeforums for other places that are legitimate.

I am not affiliated with any of these websites or businesses, but I have been through their educational programmes. If you are an intrinsically motivated self-learner/self-teacher that works well on their own with occasional mentor contact, then I can highly recommend them.

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