Portrait of Maxime Portaz

Maxime Portaz

Machine Learning Engineer · Solutions Architect

Building reliable AI systems — from research to production

ML Engineer / AI Architect with 10+ years of experience in AI systems design, LLM optimization, and large-scale deployment. Proven track record leading the architecture and implementation of GenAI solutions (LLMs, RAG, agent-based systems) and scalable cloud infrastructures (AWS, GCP)

LLM Inference Computer Vision Distributed Systems MLOps Metrics & Observability

Currently

Experience

Graphcore — Solutions Architect / Field AI Engineer

Sep 2021 – Present · Bristol (UK) & Remote

Designing custom AI Solutions for multiple customers including large scale distributed training pipelines and scalable real-time deployments. Evangelizing Graphcore’s AI technologies.

PythonPyTorchTensorFlowJAXPoplar

Trax Retail — Research Scientist

May 2020 – Sep 2021 · Paris

Developed CV and OCR pipelines for retail automation, bridging store operations and customer experience. Researched and designed applications for people tracking, action recognition, and object detection/recognition. From large-scale training to mobile deployment.

PyTorchOpenCVTensorFlowAWSSwift (iOS)

Qwant Research — Research Scientist · Product Owner

Nov 2018 – May 2020 · Paris

Product manager for the newly created Image Search Engine, from research to production. Built retrieval and reranking systems powering 4M+ daily users.

Publications: Image Search Engine approach, QISS, Graphcore IPUs test

PythonC++VespaKubernetesAzure

PhD — Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble

Sep 2015 – Oct 2018

PhD research in Deep Learning for Multimedia Information Retrieval, with applications to image and video understanding. Teaching assistant for Machine Learning and Python at Grenoble University.

PyTorchOpenCVCaffe

Inria — Research Engineer (Pervasive Interaction)

Nov 2014 – Aug 2015 · Grenoble

3D scene generation, multimodal data fusion, and Kinect‑based motion capture.

C++OpenGLKinect SDK

Skills

Programming languages

Python C/C++ C# Go Typescript

Frameworks and Libraries

Pytorch vLLM Ray Hugging Face TensorRT OpenCV

Tools and Platforms

AWS Git CI/CD (GitHub Actions), Kubernetes Docker FastAPI Kubeflow Airflow Grafana/Prometheus Weights & Biases

Focus Topics and Concepts

GenAI LLM Serving RAG Information Retrieval Distributed Training & Inference Model Optimization (PEFT, LoRA) MLOps

Education

Université Grenoble Alpes

PhD — Multimodal Information Retrieval (2015–2018)

Ensimag — UGA

MOSIG Master — Graphics, Vision & Robotics (2013–2015)

Université Joseph Fourier

BSc — Mathematics & Computer Science (2010–2013)

Certifications

Agile Project Management

Google

Introduction to Genomic Technologies

Johns Hopkins University

Spécialisation Deep Learning

DeepLearning.AI

Improving Deep Neural Networks: Hyperparameter tuning, Regularization and Optimization

DeepLearning.AI

Structuring Machine Learning Projects

DeepLearning.AI