Julian Forrester, PhD

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14+ years building scalable systems, leading engineering teams, and taking startups from stealth to market. ML research background with a bias for production. As passionate about shipping products as publishing the research behind them.

About Me

I'm a hands-on technical leader who thrives at the intersection of architecture, machine learning, and execution. From designing distributed systems to deploying ML pipelines in production, I truly enjoy every aspect of full-stack development. I believe the best engineering leaders still write code and review PRs whilst empowering their teams to do their best work.

With a PhD in Machine Learning, I understand the theoretical background behind modern AI systems and how those ideas translate into production software. My recent work implementing agentic AI systems has been the most exciting work of my career.

Hands-On Leader

I still write and review code every day.

Builder's Mindset

With the advent of AI, clean architecture is more important than ever.

Constant Learner

A PhD in machine learning taught me that we should never stop learning.

Team Multiplier

My best work is making the people around me more effective.

Recent Roles

PES Technologies

2022 — Present

Head of Software

Leading the software engineering team across ML, cloud, web, and mobile systems. Driving company-wide technical strategy, production ML integration, and delivery from proof-of-concept through commercial launch across multiple platforms.

TypeScriptReactReact NativeASP.NET CorePythonDeep LearningAzureGISPostgreSQLGraphQLBLE

Cloudshelf Ltd.

2021 — 2022

Head of ML

Full-stack development and ML integration for offline-first in-store retail experiences. Partnered with the executive team on product roadmap, built the engineering team from scratch, and created ML-backed tools that helped store owners guide shoppers to the right products.

TypeScriptReactNext.jsGraphQLPostgreSQLPythonPyTorchAzure

IronForge Development, LLC

2020 — 2021

Engineering Manager

Managed an international engineering team across multiple timezones, delivering full-stack client products ahead of schedule. Moved release workflows from manual deployment to automated CI/CD, reduced cloud spend by 55%, and mentored junior developers.

Node.jsReactPostgreSQLGraphQLPythonTensorFlowTerraformCI/CDAWS

Skills & Expertise

Frontend

ReactNext.jsTypeScriptTailwindReact NativeVite

Backend

Node.jsNestJSASP.NET CoreRustGraphQLREST

ML & AI

PythonTensorFlowPyTorchLLMsRAGLangchainDeep LearningST-CGP

Infrastructure

AzureAWSDockerTerraformSentry

Data & Storage

PostgreSQLRedisParquetClickhouse

Architecture

MicroservicesServerlessTDDSystem Design

Recent Projects

oat: opinionated agentic tool

oat: opinionated agentic tool

A Rust-based agentic programming tool built around three key concepts: collaborative and adversarial planning, intelligent context handling, and RAG-based semantic memory.

Rustrig-coreFastEmbedLLMsAI AgentsRAGSemantic Search
Untitled AI Design App

Untitled AI Design App

An AI-powered, agentic design system that turns prompts, screenshots, and inspiration into interactive product prototypes.

Node.jsVercel AI SDKLLMsAI AgentsReactViteTailwindDocker
ST-CGP

ST-CGP

A strongly typed extension of Cartesian Genetic Programming for evolving interpretable, type-safe programs across vision, agriculture, and sensor-modelling problems.

Genetic ProgrammingCGPST-CGPMachine LearningComputer VisionPythonOpenCV

Get In Touch

Whether you have a project in mind, want to talk ML or AI, or just want to connect, I'd love to hear from you.

Contact Info

Location

Cambridge, UK