Devin Niles

AI Chatbot Developer / Conversational AI Engineer

Candy AI

Feb 2024 - Jun 2026 • 2 yrs 4 mos

Designed and fine-tuned large language models for personalized companion chat experiences across Candy AI's flagship platform, improving response coherence and emotional tone matching by 38% based on user engagement metrics. Built and optimized multi-turn dialogue pipelines handling over 2 million daily conversations, reducing average latency from 850ms to 310ms through model distillation and inference caching. Implemented safety and content moderation layers using classifier ensembles, cutting policy-violating outputs by 72% while maintaining conversational naturalness. Collaborated with product and research teams to A/B test personality presets and memory retention features, driving a 24% increase in session length. Developed age-gating and consent verification flows to ensure compliance with adult content regulations.

Computer Vision Research Assistant

NVIDIA

Sep 2019 - Dec 2020 • 1 yr 3 mos

Developed real-time object detection models (YOLOv5, EfficientDet, Faster R-CNN) for autonomous driving simulation datasets, achieving 67.3% mAP on challenging weather and lighting conditions. Optimized neural network inference on NVIDIA Jetson Nano edge devices, achieving 45 frames per second at 8 watts power consumption through TensorRT acceleration and INT8 quantization. Co-authored an internal technical report on Transfer Learning for Low-Latency Traffic Sign Recognition.