Hello, I'm Manu Zhephod Chert

I bulid things

From highly scalable Kubernetes Clusters to CNC machine programs for robot parts, and many things in between.

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About Me

I like to solve challenging technical problems. Currently I'm in SF, I spent a couple years vagabonding around the planet before moving here. I enjoy working on Kubernetes Clusters, and scaling compute. Over the past decade, I have gone from building file servers for small businesses, to writing the firmware in Solar Cars, helping accelerate drug discovery by building highly scalable compute clusters in the cloud, and now scaling up code sandboxes for the use of A.I. Agents.

When I'm not coding, you can find me stargazing, riding my motorcycle, portaging in the wilderness, or scuba diving.

Here are a few technologies I’ve been working with recently:

Kubernetes Python Terraform GCP PostgreSQL C FreeRTOS AWS Rust

Experience

Solutions Consultant

zhephod.xyz

March 2023 - October 2024

Built a bunch of different things for clients while vagabonding around the planet.

  • Improved development practices, and designed a system for scalable ScRNA inference for Phenomic AI
  • Built Solar Car Telemetry solution for Blue Sky Solar Racing, used in the 2023 World Solar Challenge
  • Designed a system for monitoring cold room temperatures across a warehouse for a small-scale logistics company
  • Built hybrid cloud system to dynamically spin up nodes in the cloud to manage build queue length for an A.I. hardware startup

Lead Cloud Engineer

Dewpoint Therapeutics

October 2020 - March 2023

Scaled the ML pipeline from Phenomic to handles 10s of terabytes of data, and to turn around results in a much quicker amount of time.

  • Improved the platform on AWS using Kubernetes which scales from 4 nodes to 300 and back down to 4 on demand to process large microscopy data sets
  • Reduced pipeline processing time by 90% by horizontally scaling workload using DASK
  • Interviewed, and trained two cloud engineers to work on the platform

Cloud Engineer

Phenomic AI

May 2019 - September 2020

Built a highly scalable machine learning platform to accelerate drug discovery.

  • Redesigned storage architecture for microscopy data, reducing cost by 90% with minimal impacts on performance
  • Fully automated stack deployment, enabling licensing of the platform to 3rd parties.
  • Found several performance improvements within the machine learning codebase by using tools such as Tensorboard, Prometheus, and Grafana
  • Tuned platform node selections, to maximize load factors, and reduce cost.

Lead Firmware Engineer

Blue Sky Solar Racing

February 2018 - September 2021

Built and raced a solar car across the Australian Outback

  • Built entire firmware stack for the Gen 10, working with GPIO, SPI, ADC, etc.
  • Led the development of improvements to the firmware for the Gen 11 car.
  • Learned to read PCB schematics, and follow traces to debug hardware issues
  • CNC machined the mould for the chassis

Featured Projects

IAI Platform

I spent 4 years transforming a hacked-together airflow pipeline into a highly scalable machine learning platform capable of processing several terabytes of microscopy data daily, enabling the biology team to iterate quickly.

Kubernetes AWS Python Cloudformation Airflow

Blue Sky Solar Racing Viridian

Working primarily on the firmware team I built the embedded firmware for the solar car. Which included communication between driver inputs and the motor, as well as collecting all of our telemetry data. I was also heavily involved with many other sub-teams, managing the compute cluster used for CFD simulations, creating the CNC machine programs used for machining the chassis mold, and assisting the design team in improving design for manufacturability. I also drove the Solar Car!

C FreeRTOS STM32 Slurm Altium Mastercam
Blue Sky

Get In Touch

Please reach out if you have something interesting to talk about.

[email protected] x.com/zhephod github.com/icehunt