Skip to content
Alberto Rivas II

About


Applied AI Engineer at Pioneer Circuits, building document-understanding and retrieval systems end to end — problem framing through production. Based in Los Angeles, CA.

Experience

  1. Applied AI Engineer

    January 2026Present

    Pioneer Circuits · Santa Ana, CA

    • Led the full AI solution lifecycle as sole engineer — problem framing through production deployment — setting team-wide design patterns and mentoring interns, for a document-understanding and vector-retrieval system that captured tribal knowledge and cut contract-review overhead 16x, from 1 to 16 reviews a day.
    • Built automated pipelines that summarise KPIs and surface actionable insights for executives, turning 50+ documents a day into decision-ready reporting.
    • Built a predictive scheduling model estimating job duration to optimise queue sequencing, tracking experiments in MLflow, lifting revenue 15% — roughly $9M a year.
    • Developed an AI-powered planning tool that generates step-by-step job routings and work-order instructions from the knowledge base, encoding material and IPC-spec requirements, accelerating job-release planning 32%.
  2. Data Scientist

    August 2023December 2025

    University of Southern California — Student Health · Los Angeles, CA

    • Delivered standardised generative-AI and RAG workflows on student-feedback data, improving analytics coverage 70% and doubling reporting efficiency.
    • Served as SME on responsible and explainable AI, leading subgroup bias-detection and fairness analysis that lifted student outreach engagement 15%.
    • Improved sentiment-analysis accuracy 27%, to 87%, by fine-tuning BERT-based models, and built engagement models on real-time feedback that lifted student retention 5%.
    • Engineered a Qdrant vector-search RAG pipeline that cut retrieval latency 33% at 92% recall@k.
    • Designed ARIMA forecasting models of student engagement, optimising resource allocation 30% and saving $120K a year.
  3. Data Scientist Intern

    June 2024August 2024

    Nexon America · Los Angeles, CA

    • Shipped a cross-functional RAG feedback tool with CI/CD and Slack monitoring, cutting reporting lag around 87.5%.
    • Deployed LLM and forecasting models on AWS (ECS, EC2) with Docker and Airflow for team reproducibility.
    • Built an AI-powered Streamlit app for real-time, API-driven sentiment analysis, cutting reporting time 50%.
    • Automated Snowflake pipelines for LLM workflows, improving training efficiency 35% through schema optimisation.
  4. Data Scientist

    August 2018July 2023

    Orion Housing · Los Angeles, CA

    • Developed and deployed predictive pricing models on Dockerised Airflow pipelines in production, adding over $200K in annual revenue.
    • Partnered with marketing and operations on model-driven pricing, raising average occupancy 15% in underutilised units.
    • Automated model deployment with Dockerised Airflow pipelines, cutting deployment lag 40% and scaling inference 2x.

Skills

Languages & data
  • Python
  • SQL
  • NoSQL
  • Snowflake
  • Pandas
  • NumPy
ML & AI
  • Scikit-learn
  • PyTorch
  • TensorFlow
  • LLMs
  • RAG
  • LangChain / LangGraph
  • Qdrant
MLOps & cloud
  • Docker
  • Airflow
  • MLflow
  • CI/CD
  • Git
  • AWS (Bedrock, ECS, EC2)
  • Model monitoring

Education

  • Master of Science in Business Analytics (STEM)

    University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business

    Los Angeles, CA

  • Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Linguistics

    University of Southern California, College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

    Los Angeles, CA