Senior Software Engineer × AI Builder

Seven years of enterprise .NET, now pointed at AI

I build high-volume production systems in C#, React, and SQL Server. Lately, I've been wiring those same skills into LLMs, RAG pipelines, and multi-agent workflows, all running on local GPU hardware.

Project vondraysanford.com
Engineer V. Sanford
Rev 2026.09
Scale Production
Status Operational
Approved for Production

Built to learn. Shipped to prove it.

Side projects with open repos, live demos, and build logs. The three that shipped lead with their measured results.

SparkBench

Benchmarks and fine-tuning studies on a pair of NVIDIA DGX Sparks. Not that Spark. The flagship experiment LoRA fine-tunes a 7–14B open model and asks whether it can replace the frontier model inside AgentReview's Quality Agent at matching precision and recall for near-zero cost per review, with everything but the model frozen at a tagged commit. Seven working weekends, one binary exit test per phase, every result traced to an MLflow run. The two-Spark link was proven first with a 320B model served across both nodes; that detour lives in the Lab, not in the experiment.

LoRA Hugging Face vLLM MLflow DVC

The 10X Engineer Toolkit

The way I work with AI coding agents, written down as a system: skills, agents, prompts, templates, and workflows so every ticket, review, and deploy gets the same care. All of it is plain markdown that works with Claude Code, Copilot, or Cursor, and it installs as a Claude Code plugin in two commands.

Claude Code Agent Skills Prompts Templates Workflows

Twitter Sentiment Bot

An end-to-end NLP pipeline that scores tweet sentiment and flags bot accounts with a 13-feature XGBoost classifier, serving live predictions through a Discord bot. Even back then, trained models were RSA-signed and verified at load time so the inference layer never runs a tampered pickle.

Build log Reflection ↗
Python XGBoost NLTK Twitter API Discord.py
Open Source Contributions

MonoGame — cross-platform C#/.NET game framework · 14K+ stars

Authored XML API documentation adapting archived XNA reference material, adding platform-specific remarks for DirectX, DesktopGL, iOS, and Android runtime behavior.

GitHub ↗ (opens in new tab)

Cataclysm-DDA — post-apocalyptic survival roguelike · 13K+ stars

Fixed the solar cell's implausible half-meter longest_side and added looks_like sprite fallbacks for the Xedra Evolved dream weapons, across two merged pull requests.

GitHub ↗ (opens in new tab)

KanaDojo — minimalist Japanese learning platform · 3.2K+ stars

Standardized the Japan trivia answer format to support multiple accepted answers per question and added a 「〜ても」 grammar entry, across two merged pull requests.

GitHub ↗ (opens in new tab)

KodeKloud AI-102 — official Azure AI Engineer course repo

Found a hardcoded Azure Cognitive Services endpoint and live API key exposed in a public course sample and submitted the security fix replacing the credentials with placeholders.

GitHub ↗ (opens in new tab)

Engineer first.
AI-obsessed second.

For the past 7+ years, I've been building the kind of software that can't go down: C# APIs, SQL Server architectures, React frontends, all running at scale for companies that process serious volume. One system I optimized validated over a trillion dollars in historical records. Another tool I shipped cut a team's monthly support tickets by 90%.

Everything on this page is proof you can check yourself: certifications with one-click credential links, projects with open repos and live demos, and benchmarks run on hardware I own. The full work history is available on request.

Now I'm taking all of that production discipline and applying it to AI. I'm building RAG apps, experimenting with multi-agent systems, fine-tuning open models on my own pair of NVIDIA DGX Sparks, and stacking certifications that reflect hands-on skill.

7+
Years in Production Software
$1T+
Historical Data Validated
90%
Support Tickets Reduced
11K
Daily Users Supported

What I build with

Production .NET and data engineering at the core, with an expanding AI and ML toolkit on top.

Backend & Data

C# / .NET Core SQL Server T-SQL ASP.NET MVC Entity Framework Dapper LINQ REST APIs

Frontend & UI

React.js JavaScript React Native HTML / CSS jQuery Responsive Design

Cloud & DevOps

Azure Cloud Docker GitHub Actions Cloudflare IIS Git PowerShell

Databases

SQL Server Query Optimization MySQL PostgreSQL Data Modeling SSIS / SSRS

Tools & Infrastructure

NVIDIA DGX Spark Python Visual Studio Postman SoapUI JAMS WINSCP

Where I've studied

The foundation is a computer science degree. The proof is everything below it: verified certifications and projects you can actually open and run.

Education

B.S. Computer Science · Georgia Southern University


Certs that mean something

I pick certifications that prove I can build, not just define terms.

Microsoft Azure
AZ
900

Azure Fundamentals

Cloud concepts, Azure services, security, privacy, compliance, and pricing

✓ Verified ↗
AI
900

Azure AI Fundamentals

AI concepts, Azure ML, computer vision, and NLP services

✓ Verified ↗
AI
102

Azure AI Engineer Associate

Building and deploying Azure Cognitive Services, AI solutions, and knowledge mining pipelines

✓ Verified ↗
AI
300

Machine Learning Operations Engineer Associate

Training, evaluating, and deploying ML and GenAI models with Azure Machine Learning and Microsoft Foundry

In Progress
GitHub
GH
900

GitHub Foundations

Git fundamentals, GitHub collaboration, repositories, workflows, and project management

✓ Verified ↗
GH
300

GitHub Copilot

AI-assisted development, prompt crafting, Copilot configuration, and responsible AI usage

✓ Verified ↗
Anthropic
MCP

Introduction to Model Context Protocol

Building MCP servers that give LLM-powered apps structured access to tools and data

✓ Verified ↗
CC

Claude Code in Action

Agentic coding workflows, terminal-based AI development, and real-world Claude Code usage

✓ Verified ↗
AS

Introduction to Agent Skills

Designing and implementing reusable agent skill modules for AI-powered workflows

✓ Verified ↗
SA

Introduction to Subagents

Orchestrating multi-agent systems with subagent delegation and task decomposition

✓ Verified ↗

Local AI infrastructure

Fine-tuning, benchmarking, and multi-agent experiments on the two DGX Sparks sitting on my desk.

System Characteristics — Cluster Lucia Snapshot · 2026-09-14
Nodes 2 × NVIDIA DGX Spark (GB10)
Memory 2 × 128 GB unified · 261 GB cluster
Interconnect ConnectX-7 · 200 Gbps per link · 185.96 Gbps measured
Stack vLLM (tensor-parallel 2) + Ollama
Resident model GLM-5.3-Flash · 320B MoE · 4-bit EXL3
Memory in use 244 / 261 GB
First token, 1k prompt 1.1 s
Status online
# vllm bench serve, random tokens 1k in / 256 out: decode floor 13.5–15.2 tok/s · real-text runs pending

Why local?

Running models on my own hardware means I can experiment without watching API costs climb, keep data completely private, and iterate on model behavior without hitting rate limits or usage caps. When you own the compute, you move faster.

The DGX Spark's unified memory lets me load models that would normally require multiple consumer GPUs. Two of them bridged over ConnectX-7 go further: they hold a 320B mixture-of-experts model between them, served tensor-parallel with vLLM behind an OpenAI-compatible endpoint that VS Code talks to like any hosted model. What that took is written up, and so is the first thing I asked the model to build: SparkDash, a dashboard for its own server, built in one agent session against a spec and scorecard written beforehand.

  • Local LLM inference and benchmarking
  • Two-node tensor-parallel serving over RoCE
  • Fine-tuning open models on domain data
  • Multi-agent workflow development
  • RAG pipeline prototyping
  • Model quantization experiments

Learning in public

Notes, tutorials, and the occasional postmortem from the move into AI engineering.

Sep 17, 2026 · 7 min read

Your AI Coding History Is a Dataset. Here's How I'd Actually Use It.

The ai-data-extractor project can pull your entire Claude Code, Cursor, and Cline chat history into structured data. That's interesting. What you do with it afterward is where things get genuinely useful.

AI
Sep 15, 2026 · 7 min read

The "AI Safety Pact" Is a Cartel in a Lab Coat

When the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind agreed to slow AI development for "safety," skeptics didn't have to look hard for the ulterior motive. This smells less like a safety pause and more like incumbents pulling up the ladder.

AI
Sep 14, 2026 · 8 min read

SparkDash: I Gave a 320B Model a Spec and Pointed It at the Server Serving It

GLM-5.3-Flash, 320B parameters split across two DGX Sparks over a ConnectX-7 cable, built its own monitoring dashboard in 44 minutes. The scorecard was written before the session: what it got right, what broke, and whether the fixes went to the cause.

AI
Sep 13, 2026 · 9 min read

320B on Two Sparks: What It Actually Takes to Run a Mixture-of-Experts Model Across a Home Cluster

I bridged two NVIDIA DGX Sparks, loaded a 320B open-weights MoE model across both, and wired the endpoint into GitHub Copilot Chat. Every step, every error, and every number, from cable to first correct answer.

Infrastructure
Sep 10, 2026 · 7 min read

Engineering Patterns Beat Model Power: What the Google AI Agents Challenge Actually Proved

Google's AI Agents Challenge surfaced something most people building multi-agent systems already suspect but rarely say out loud: the model isn't the bottleneck. The architecture is.

AI
Sep 8, 2026 · 8 min read

DriftWatch, measured: what a logistic regression, a coin flip, and a 32-second cold start taught me about ML systems

Six phases, 21 days, and every number measured. The wrap-up on DriftWatch: what it produced, what it cost, what broke, and what's still not done.

mlops

Vondray Sanford

Let's build something

Open to full-time roles, contract work, and collaborations, especially anything that puts AI into production software.