Tristan Hazelwood · Coffs Harbour NSW · Remote, AU & international

I build AI systems that keep running when nobody is watching.

Most AI work stops at the demo. Mine is judged on what survives contact with production: retrieval that stays accurate as the corpus grows, agents that fail safely, pipelines that report their own breakage instead of going quietly stale.

Open to senior applied-AI and AI-engineering roles — employment or contract.

This page is the short version, written for hiring teams. See the full site → for the technical detail, the article archive, and a chat agent you can interrogate about any of it.

01 / What I bring

Production AI, and the discipline to keep it honest.

Each of these is something I have shipped and operated, not something I have read about. The line under each is the concrete evidence.

Retrieval & knowledge infrastructure

RAG over real corpora: embeddings, vector search, deduplication, chunk scoring, context and memory design, multi-source ingestion with quality gates.

102k vectors · 13k documents · 8 sources

Agentic systems & orchestration

Multi-agent workflows with approval layers, tool dispatch and audit logging — built so a wrong answer is caught before it becomes a wrong action.

12+ concurrent agents · 200+ jobs → one scheduler

Data & automation engineering

Ingestion pipelines, API and CRM integration, workflow automation, Discord and Telegram bots, email and social automation.

20+ source adapters behind one contract

Infrastructure & operations

VPS administration, containers, service supervision, VPN, GPU inference, monitoring and alerting. I deploy and run what I build.

Linux + Windows · CUDA · Tailscale · nginx

Data stores

Schema design and operational use across relational, document, cache and vector stores — chosen for the access pattern, not for novelty.

PostgreSQL · MongoDB · Redis · Qdrant · DuckDB

Evaluation & quality gates

Benchmark design, regression gates and measurement discipline — the difference between "it looked right" and "it was verified".

Fine-tuning experiments · eval frameworks

02 / The record

Dated honestly, including the parts that are short.

I have been building AI systems full-time for about fourteen months. Before that I spent four and a half years as a fundamental analyst in crypto markets. I would rather you read that accurately from me than infer something generous and discover otherwise.

May 2026 — present
Independent AI Systems Builder Self-directed, remote. Building and operating multi-agent systems, retrieval infrastructure and the automation around them.
Jul 2025 — May 2026
AI Lead — Crypto Consulting Institute Independent contractor, remote. Built and ran a production community-intelligence and support agent for a paying client: 80,000+ messages mined into an automated support system, with newsletters and live market data.
Jan 2021 — Jun 2025
Fundamental Analyst & Investment Consultant Crypto Consulting Institute, freelance. Research, valuation and written analysis — where the habit of showing my working comes from.
2019 — 2024
Earlier career Rehabilitation consultant (NSW workers-compensation caseloads), project management, and fifteen years of client-facing work. It is why I can explain a system to the people who have to live with it.
Education
Bachelor of Psychology (Honours) Southern Cross University, Coffs Harbour, 2014. Also six units of a Master of Business Psychology at the University of Newcastle — discontinued, not conferred.

03 / Verify it

Falsifiable, or it didn't happen.

Everything below is something you can open in another tab right now. I would rather be checked than believed.

  • Live product vocax.ai — a multi-tenant SaaS I designed, built and deployed. Live in beta and taking payments.
  • Open source autoresearch-orchestrator-pattern — a clean-room agentic research-loop orchestrator.
  • Open source discord-voice-transcribe — voice capture and transcription for Discord.
  • Open source vimeo-mcp-lite — a small, focused MCP server.
  • Writing The article archive — written and published by a pipeline I built, which also gates its own quality. The system that publishes it is the same kind of system I am describing above.
  • This site tristanhazelwood.com — the longer, technical account of the same work, including the parts that failed.

04 / Fit

Where I am useful, and where I am not.

I am strongest where a system has to run unattended and stay correct — retrieval pipelines, agent workflows, automation with real consequences, and the observability that tells you when any of it drifts. I work end to end: I will design it, build it, deploy it, and be the one who gets paged.

That range covers a lot of ground: greenfield build, hardening something that already exists, evaluation and research work that needs a rigorous hand, or getting a vendor platform genuinely productive rather than merely purchased. I learn systems quickly and in public — I taught myself distributed systems to a professional standard, then did the same with AI.

The one real constraint is location. I am based in Coffs Harbour NSW and work remotely across Australian and international hours. For a hybrid or on-site role I am open to it, but a relocation allowance or travel expenses would need to be part of the conversation.

Open to permanent employment or contract, whichever suits the team.

05 / See it

Or watch me teach it.

A six-minute cut from an AI literacy course I built and delivered for a client — a non-technical audience, live sessions, no script. If you would rather see how someone explains a thing than read their claim that they can, this is that.

Teaching AI — course showreel · 6:30

The full sessions, unlisted, if you want the long version:

Get in touch

Ask me something specific.

The fastest way to judge whether I can do the job is to ask about a real problem you have. Send me one and I will tell you plainly how I would approach it — and whether I am the wrong person for it. A full CV is available on request.

Email me LinkedIn GitHub

Before you read on

You're on the short version.

This page is curated for hiring teams - the record, dated honestly, and the evidence to check it against. The full site has the technical detail behind every claim, the article archive, and a chat agent you can interrogate about any of it.

Both pages were generated and taste-gated by a system I built myself - not Wix, not Squarespace, not a website builder with an AI button on it. The generator, the quality gate that can refuse a page, and the pipeline that publishes the articles are all mine. This page is a work sample as much as it is a CV.

Ask about the work

This is the same assistant that runs on the main site. It answers from a curated corpus, will say when it does not know, and cannot run code or touch any live system.