Dan Saunders

About Me

I'm a senior ML engineer at Axolotl AI, where I work on implementing optimizations and algorithms for Axolotl, an open source LLM post-training library.

Previously, I worked at Amazon Web Services as a ML engineer, where I led development of object detection systems, built generative AI solutions with LLMs and RAG for internal documentation, and implemented semantic search systems with clustering and summarization features.

Before AWS, I was at Sensor Tower as a Data Scientist modeling active users and retention curves for mobile apps, and at Fomoro AI as a Machine Learning Engineer developing RL models for agricultural machine control that outperformed human operators.

I received my M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science along with a B.S. in Mathematics from UMass Amherst. During my M.S. degree, I published several peer-reviewed papers at the intersection of machine learning and computational neuroscience, specifically focusing on spiking neural networks (SNNs).

Feel free to send me an email if you'd like to connect!

I have an Erdős number of 2 (path: Paul Erdős → Miklós Ruszinkó → me).

Dan Saunders

Education

M.S. Computer Science

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Focus: Machine Learning, AI

B.S. Computer Science

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Focus: Theory of Computation

B.S. Mathematics

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Focus: Mathematical Computing