Joaquín Figueroa
Computer Engineer · AI Engineer
I am the technical lead of the ICAI Platform at Universidad de Chile, an initiative bringing scientific knowledge to everyone through artificial intelligence.
I design agents, RAG systems and AI architectures, and what I enjoy most is explaining them so anyone can understand.
- +56 9 7521 1349
- [email protected]
- Santiago, Chile
- Spanish · English C1 · basic Chinese
- Graduated with highest honors
Projects
-
ICAI Platform
A system to democratize Universidad de Chile's scientific output.
- Lead
- technical lead of the project
- Coordinator
- of the ICAI AI Lab
- I define the architecture, stack and technical roadmap.
- I design LLM agents and RAG systems over the University's research.
- API implementation and GPU infrastructure management.
- Team coordination on priorities, tasks and follow-up.
Technologies: LLMs · RAG · AI Agents · Fine-tuning · GPU infra
-
Chilean2Sign
Spanish to Chilean Sign Language video translator using video diffusion and multi-condition tokenization.
- 1st
- to test a new Chilean dataset
- CLEI
- paper presented in 2026
- I trained a generative video diffusion system that turns pose sequences into sign videos.
- I trained a GPT-2 based text-to-pose model, tokenized through an autoencoder.
- Part of this work was published in a paper presented at CLEI 2026.
Technologies: PyTorch · GPT-2 · Diffusion · DWPose · HaMeR
-
Presidential Debate
Classification, clustering and refinement of citizens' questions for the presidential debate.
- 8,000
- citizens' questions
- 25 min
- to process them all
- I filtered, clustered and refined real questions from citizens.
- I parallelized inference on the NLHPC Leftraru supercomputer.
Technologies: Qwen3 · Ollama · DBSCAN · K-Means · HPC
Journey
Tap each stop to see more
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Backend development for SmartSell.
- Built three Django applications and their data models.
- Implemented business logic for data integrity and scalability.
- Wrote technical documentation for the team.
-
Clinical Records project.
- Developed APIs in InterSystems.
- Built a mobile app to capture patient data.
- Automated data migrations, reducing manual errors.
-
Event management web application.
- Gathered requirements and modeled the data.
- Designed the interfaces and built the full-stack solution.
- Researched international solutions and reached out to foreign companies.
-
AI projects and new technology literacy.
- Developed AI projects to automate processes.
- Led architecture decisions and model selection.
- Trained more than 500 people, including sessions in Talca and Concepción.
-
Graduated as Computer Engineer with highest honors.
- Thesis: Spanish to Chilean Sign Language translator with generative AI.
-
Presented my paper at the Latin American Computing Conference.
- Presented the research to an international audience.
-
Technical direction of the ICAI Platform.
- I define the architecture, stack and technical roadmap.
- I develop LLM agents, RAG systems and GPU infrastructure.
- I coordinate the team and track progress toward the goals.
CLEI 2026
From Santiago to Mexico to present my research.
My thesis became a paper: I trained a diffusion model to generate Chilean Sign Language video and was the first to test COTRA-LSCh, a new Chilean corpus.
Skills
AI & software engineering
- AI architectures & agents
I design end-to-end LLM systems, from tool-using agents and multi-layer workflows to RAG systems.
- Model training
Fine-tuning and training of generative and vision models, such as diffusion, YOLO or GPT-2, and their evaluation with the right metrics.
- Backend & infrastructure
APIs and services in Django and FastAPI, Docker containers, and management of GPU and HPC servers to train and serve models at scale.
Soft skills
- Communication & teaching
I translate complex technical ideas for non-technical audiences. I have led many training sessions, remote and in person, some with up to 500 people watching live.
- Technical leadership & product vision
I have led multiple projects, both at the university and in professional settings, efficiently connecting what users and institutions need with feasible technical solutions.
- Adaptability
I adapt easily across domains, such as health, education, media and research, and across stacks, from web backends to state-of-the-art frontier models.
How I work
- Documentation & traceability
I work with Spec Driven Development (SDD) to keep the product traceable, always be clear on what is being built and develop in a structured way. In particular, I use OpenSpec.
- Development with coding agents
I prepare context, conventions and documentation so coding agents deliver correct, reviewable changes, faster and without losing control.
- Metric-driven iteration
I define how to measure success before building and validate each iteration with data (accuracy, video quality, latency), not intuition.
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