AI engineer working on LLM systems in production — agent design, tool and data integration, evaluation, and deployment.
AI Engineer on Bell's Applied AI team, building and deploying agents on Google Cloud with Gemini Enterprise and Antigravity. ML research assistant at GEODES, the software engineering lab at Université de Montréal. Member of the Cohere Labs Open Science Community.
Crisis-detection guardrail — 1st of 77 teams at the Mila × Bell × BuzzHPC × Kids Help Phone AI Safety Hackathon. Real-time conversation safety classification for youth mental health support: a fine-tuned multilingual BERT (mmBERT) feeding a Cohere LLM judge through a five-question chain-of-thought framework, with the classifier score injected into the prompt as a prior rather than ensembled. F1 0.906, recall 0.969 — the highest recall in the top 10.
Automated code review — research at GEODES, advised by Prof. Houari Sahraoui. Fine-tuning small open-source code models with QLoRA / PEFT to close the quality gap with large proprietary models, plus an evaluation methodology that benchmarks generated reviews against human reviewers.
Dynamic pricing in Paris — ~60,000 Airbnb listings assembled from historical snapshots and a custom multithreaded scraper, testing whether explicit temporal features improve price prediction. Random Forest, R² 0.525 with uncapped luxury listings retained.
- AI Tinkerers Montreal — recall-first safety classifiers for high-stakes settings
- CRIM 40th Anniversary Conference — AI safety for LLMs
Agents & LLMs — Python, Gemini, Gemini Enterprise, Antigravity, MCP, LLM-as-judge evaluation, chain-of-thought prompting
Model training — PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, QLoRA / PEFT, BERT / mmBERT
Cloud — Google Cloud Platform (Vertex AI, BigQuery), AWS
Backend — Go, Java, Node.js
Frontend — TypeScript, React
Infra — Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Prometheus / Grafana
GoTo (2024–2026) — three internships into an engineering role. Go/Kafka event pipelines, React/TypeScript frontend architecture, Java data pipelines.
Ubisoft GameLab 2026 — gameplay programmer, Unreal Engine 5 and C++.
BSc Computer Science, Université de Montréal (2022–2026), with two exchange semesters at the University of Hong Kong (W2025) and Sorbonne Université (F2025).
LinkedIn · yanis.chalel@umontreal.ca
Always happy to talk about LLM evaluation, agent design, AI safety, or open-science collaborations.