Val Fajardo
Principal AI Engineer & Researcher AI & Data Leadership Team
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolVal Fajardo is a Principal AI Engineer and researcher with a PhD in Statistics from the University of Waterloo, combining deep theoretical grounding in probability and statistics with hands-on ML and software engineering across startups and industry. With roles ranging from founding engineer at LlamaIndex to AI leadership at The Carlyle Group and applied NLP work at the Vector Institute, he builds production-ready models that translate complex data into actionable finance and enterprise insights. He has a track record of leading ML teams and skunkworks labs, mentoring students and practitioners, and teaching large undergraduate classes—evidence of a rare mix of research rigor and communication skill. Comfortable shipping code and proofs, Val’s background in both academia and high-velocity product environments lets him bridge cutting-edge research and pragmatic deployment.
4 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MSc), Statistics, Master of Science (MSc), Statistics at Brock UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Statistics, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Statistics at University of Waterloo
Github Skills (49)
agentic10
ocr10
machine-learning10
vector-database10
llm10
federated-learning10
natural-language-processing10
fine-tuning10
gpt10
nlp10
rust10
llama-index10
dataloader10
application10
langchain9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
nerdai/react-the-complete-guide
Mar 2022 - Feb 2023
Contributions:262 pushes, 1 branch in 10 months
VectorInstitute/ai-pocket-reference
Feb 2025 - Aug 2025
A streamlined reference manual for AI practitioners, students, and developers to quickly look up core concepts and implementations.
Contributions:42 reviews, 41 PRs, 88 pushes in 5 months
ai
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.