Daniel Vaz
Software engineer · open to backend, cloud and data roles

I build what I wish existed.

Tools born from my own passions, built by breaking big ideas into simple steps.

Projects

01

Learn That Song live

Paste a YouTube link, get six instrument stems you can mute, slow down, transpose and loop. CloudFront serves the page, which sends the link to a Lambda API that queues a job in SQS. An on-demand EC2 worker splits the audio with Demucs into S3, and the browser caches the stems and plays them in sync with Tone.js.

Learn That Song: six instrument stems with tempo, pitch and loop controls
Python · JavaScript · PyTorch · Tone.js · AWS (Lambda, SQS, EC2, S3, CloudFront)
02

CNN-Based Local Feature Descriptor Learning from a Single Image

A CNN that turns patches around keypoints into feature descriptors, trained without a large dataset. Crops and augmentations of a single source image are paired so the network learns which patches show the same point. Keypoints from OpenCV are described, matched across image pairs and benchmarked against SIFT: within 1.5% of its accuracy over 70 pairs, with 4% more matches.

Python · PyTorch · OpenCV

Experience

  1. Jul 2025 – Oct 2025 · Internship · Canberra

    Trellis Data

    AI Programmer Intern

    At ML Research Labs, Trellis Data's R&D division, I worked on an early-stage LangGraph agentic translation workflow for preserving Indigenous languages, inspired by the Machine Translation from One Book paper.

    • Improved translation accuracy by 20% with a new chunking strategy.
    • Improved translation quality by 8% by rewriting LLM queries to target recurring errors, such as missed pronouns.
    • Made load times over 80% faster by switching to persistent FAISS vector stores.
    • Built a FastAPI interface so external users could interact with the workflow.
    • Cut evaluation time by 36% by parallelising 20+ Gemini mixed-model setups with asyncio, keeping translation quality within 3%.
    • Python
    • LangGraph
    • FastAPI
    • FAISS
    • Gemini
    • asyncio
  2. Aug 2021 – Jul 2024 · Full-time · Bangalore

    Hewlett Packard Enterprise

    Software Engineer

    In HPE's HPC division, I worked on the System Monitoring Application (SMA), a distributed monitoring and diagnostics application used by several of the world's top supercomputers.

    • Extended SMA's Kafka-based data collection services and built visualisation dashboards in Grafana.
    • Tracked down issues in production test environments ahead of each release.
    • Picked as the sole representative from a global team of senior engineers to fly to LUMI, Europe's largest supercomputer, and fix an issue blocking acceptance.
    • Over one week on-site, found the data filtering setup that kept critical monitoring data flowing without gaps under a tight ingestion limit, and saw SMA through to sign-off.
    • Redesigned 50+ Grafana dashboards with the on-site hardware engineers, and made them up to 80% faster to load by optimising the underlying SQL queries.
    • Python
    • Go
    • Linux
    • Kubernetes
    • Kafka
    • PostgreSQL
    • Elasticsearch
    • Logstash
    • Grafana
    • Helm
    • Podman
    • Docker
    • Ansible
  3. Feb 2021 – Jul 2021 · Internship · Bangalore

    Hewlett Packard Enterprise

    Software Engineer Intern

    I started at HPE as an intern in its largest R&D division in India, on a data centre digital transformation initiative to replace fragmented Excel-based tracking.

    • Built a full-stack MERN inventory management application with a three-tier RBAC approval workflow.
    • Added in-app migration of legacy data from FY 2019-20 and FY 2020-21, with MongoDB schema and Formik validation flagging malformed values.
    • Enabled real-time monitoring of 5,000+ consignments a year.
    • Turned the internship into a full-time Software Engineer offer, with a recommendation from my mentor.
    • JavaScript
    • Express.js
    • React.js
    • Node.js
    • MongoDB
    • Formik
  4. Jun 2019 – Jul 2019 · Internship · Mumbai

    Fourth Signal

    Web Development Intern

    My first internship was in Fourth Signal's web development team, enhancing their in-house, client-facing platform.

    • Refined the methodology for a quantitative mutual fund risk-score model with my mentor, ranking 50+ debt and hybrid funds.
    • Implemented the model and its front-end components as a fund-ranking and recommendation feature.
    • PHP
    • MySQL
    • Bootstrap

Off the clock

About

Daniel smiling, with trees and a lake behind him

I enjoy learning how things work, and I'll happily go down a rabbit hole to find the most efficient way of doing something. I'm always keen to give something new a go, though what I enjoy most is picking a few things and mastering them.

Outside of work, I'm aiming for a 500kg powerlifting total and, one day, to play a full song by my idol, Alexi Laiho. I like having a concert to look forward to, and I've met or seen all five of my top artists live. On quieter days, I enjoy riding my bike, car spotting and listening to podcasts. If you're looking for one, I'd highly recommend World War II with Tom Hanks.

Interested in collaborating on an idea or just having a chat?

Do reach out!