Christopher Francisque

Hi, I'm

Christopher Francisque

AI/ML Engineer & Product Manager · CS @ UPenn

I build AI systems that ship — from retrieval-augmented agents and LLM fine-tuning to distributed training pipelines and autonomous robotics. Currently a Product Manager at Pegasystems and a Computer Science master's student at the University of Pennsylvania, with an Active Secret clearance. I love turning the world's hardest problems into working software, and I'm always open to connecting on ambitious AI and engineering work.

chris@portfolio: ~
chris@portfolio:~$

About Me

I'm a Computer Science master's student at the University of Pennsylvania who builds AI systems end-to-end. Right now I'm a Product Manager at Pegasystems, where I shipped a retrieval-augmented generation solution that cut incorrect AI responses by 20% and am designing a self-improving agentic loop that evaluates and refines its own outputs.

My path into AI runs through hands-on engineering. At General Dynamics Mission Systems I built automated pipelines that parse C++ and generate unit test plans, eliminating ~80% of manual test-planning effort. As an ML research assistant at Brandeis I reproduced methods from research papers, built distributed training across 8 TPU cores, and traced parameter evolution to find the tiny embedding layers that make or break a model. Earlier, at Arcada, I scaled a platform to 100K+ users and helped harden it against bot attacks.

I am a U.S. citizen with an Active Secret Security Clearance, based in Waltham, MA, and open to relocating anywhere in the United States. I love combining research depth with shipping instincts to solve hard problems. Outside of work I'm into nutrition and bodybuilding, basketball, reading, and chess.

Education

University of Pennsylvania

MASc. Computer Science · Exp. 2027

University of Massachusetts

B.S. Mechanical Engineering · 2024

Location

Waltham, MA

Clearance

Active Secret

Experience

May 2026 - Present

Product Manager

Pegasystems | Waltham, MA

  • Reduced incorrect AI responses by 20% by implementing a retrieval-augmented generation solution that grounds answers in official documentation rather than model priors
  • Designing a self-improving agentic loop that iteratively evaluates its own outputs, incorporates feedback, and refines responses to raise answer quality and reduce manual oversight
Jan 2026 - May 2026

Software Engineer

General Dynamics Mission Systems | Dedham, MA

  • Built an automated pipeline to parse C++ source and generate unit test plans using the OpenAI API, eliminating ~80% of manual test-planning effort and saving 100+ engineering hours per month
  • Delivered technical AI training to the team on tools and workflows, contributing to a 2x increase in AI usage across the group
  • Built a Python key-generation script to test device handling of encryption key formats, achieving 100% accuracy across 264 test vectors
  • Created a GitLab CI/CD automation script that eliminated build failures on new runners
June 2025 - Jan 2026

Machine Learning Research Assistant

Brandeis University | Waltham, MA

  • Implemented methods from 3 research papers, achieving 82-90% accuracy while training only 0.037% of parameters
  • Developed pruning pipelines using learned binary masks to identify redundant parameters, improving weak models by 4%
  • Created a gradient tracking system that identified critical embedding layers whose removal caused complete model collapse despite being less than 0.01% of weights
  • Built a distributed training pipeline across 8 TPU cores (110M parameters, 67K samples), solving PyTorch XLA synchronization deadlocks that were causing training failures
June 2025 - Aug 2025

Software Engineer

Arcada | San Francisco, CA

  • Identified a security vulnerability and deployed Cloudflare infrastructure with a rate limiting strategy, reducing bot attacks by 80%
  • Scaled the platform to 100K+ unique users and $112K in revenue in 3 months from customers including OpenAI and Google
  • Owned end-to-end development of core features including voting algorithm design and scroll pagination
  • Improved product performance by 30% through data-driven optimization validated via A/B testing
June 2022 - June 2025

Manufacturing Engineer

Raytheon | Andover, MA

  • Led manufacturing improvement projects spanning root cause analysis, automation programming, fixture design, and training standardization — delivering $160,000+ in cost savings, 10-30% cycle-time reductions, and a 25% cut in operator certification time
  • Developed Python and C++ scripts to automate production data analysis for defect rates, operator performance, and statistical process control

Featured Projects

Self-Driving Toy Car

Autonomous RC car built on a Raspberry Pi 5 with a PCA9685 for precise PWM control of motors and servos. A PyTorch CNN maps raw camera frames to continuous steering and throttle outputs, deployed for real-time inference on edge hardware. Camera capture, inference, and actuation run in a closed-loop control system at 15+ Hz with sub-220ms end-to-end latency.

PyTorch CNN Raspberry Pi Edge AI Robotics

Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning Study

Comparative study of FFT, LoRA, and MFT methods on BERT-base model. Achieved 4.24% accuracy improvement on under-trained models using mask fine-tuning from 2025 ICLR paper while training only 0.037% of parameters.

PyTorch Transformers LoRA BERT Google Cloud Platform

Aircraft 6-DOF Simulation

High-fidelity flight dynamics simulation in C++ using physics-based models and numerical integration. Optimized computational performance through efficient data structures and validated against NASA data.

C++ Physics Simulation Numerical Methods Matplotlib

Technical Skills

Languages

Python C++ JavaScript/TypeScript MATLAB Java SQL Bash

AI / ML

PyTorch Transformers Hugging Face LLM Fine-tuning LoRA RAG

Tools & Platforms

Google Cloud Platform AWS Docker Git Linux Weights & Biases

Data Science

NumPy Pandas Jupyter Notebook Data Visualization

Get In Touch

I'm always happy to connect about AI/ML engineering, applied research, or building ambitious products. Whether you want to discuss collaborations, opportunities, or just trade ideas, feel free to reach out.