Senior Machine Learning Researcher & Engineer with 5+ years of experience specializing in foundation models, self-supervised learning in the healthcare domain, and generative models (LLMs and VLMs). Deep expertise in evaluating (oncology) foundation models and building distributed training systems with Ray and FSDP for large-scale, high-dimensional datasets. Track record of turning advanced representation learning research into production-grade releases, including open-weight models and widely used benchmarking frameworks. Interested in advancing local LLM capabilities, multimodal architectures, and agentic systems for real-world next-generation AI applications.

Sebastian Otálora

Senior Machine Learning Researcher & Engineer with 5+ years of experience specializing in foundation models, self-supervised learning in the healthcare domain, and generative models (LLMs and VLMs). Deep expertise in evaluating (oncology) foundation models and building distributed training systems with Ray and FSDP for large-scale, high-dimensional datasets. Track record of turning advanced representation learning research into production-grade releases, including open-weight models and widely used benchmarking frameworks. Interested in advancing local LLM capabilities, multimodal architectures, and agentic systems for real-world next-generation AI applications.

Available to hire

Senior Machine Learning Researcher & Engineer with 5+ years of experience specializing in foundation models, self-supervised learning in the healthcare domain, and generative models (LLMs and VLMs). Deep expertise in evaluating (oncology) foundation models and building distributed training systems with Ray and FSDP for large-scale, high-dimensional datasets.

Track record of turning advanced representation learning research into production-grade releases, including open-weight models and widely used benchmarking frameworks. Interested in advancing local LLM capabilities, multimodal architectures, and agentic systems for real-world next-generation AI applications.

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Work Experience

Senior Machine Learning Engineer Consultant at Cesare.ai ML team
April 1, 2026 - Present
Designed and implemented agentic workflows using LangGraph for simulations in the defense sector, automating and improving training of personnel via AI simulated environments for two large sovereign defense forces.
Senior Machine Learning Scientist & Engineer at Kaiko.ai R&D team
November 1, 2022 - March 1, 2026
Co-led research and engineering of a large-scale vision foundation model using self-supervised learning (DINOv2-style architecture) trained on 350M+ continuous high-dimensional patches. Engineered distributed training pipelines with PyTorch FSDP across 64 H200 GPUs, optimized compute utilization for terabyte-scale datasets, and built scalable data loaders to address I/O bottlenecks in gigapixel imagery. Architected a healthcare model evaluation benchmarking suite that evolved into the open-source EVA library, and co-authored a successful 2.5M grant proposal for multimodal AI research.

Education

Postdoctoral Researcher at Inselspital - University Hospital
January 1, 2021 - January 1, 2022
Ph.D. in Computer Science / Machine Learning & Representation Learning at University of Geneva
January 1, 2017 - January 1, 2021
Master of Science in Computer Science / Machine Learning at Universidad Nacional de Colombia
January 1, 2014 - January 1, 2017
Bachelor in Systems and Computational Engineering (CS equivalent degree) at Universidad Nacional de Colombia
January 1, 2009 - January 1, 2014

Qualifications

Add your qualifications or awards here.

Industry Experience

Healthcare, Professional Services, Software & Internet