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LUCALOWNDES

About

Founding and lead engineer at EvryStay, where I built the product as the only engineer, helped take it through a A$4.5M raise at a A$17M post-money valuation, and now lead a team of five.

First author and speaker at ICPP 2026 on serving DeepSeek-R1 (671B) with SGLang, work that grew out of placing 3rd in the APAC HPC-AI Competition. Credited SGLang contributor. Youngest ever UniHack winner. Dean’s Award for Academic Excellence in first year. Deferred my double degree at Monash to do this properly. All by 20.

I believe in keeping code simple and data structures lightweight. Whether I’m optimising kernels, shipping product, or training for my next marathon, I’m driven by efficient progress. I write about the infrastructure work as I go.

GitHub

5,771 contributions

Achievements

3rd place · 2025

8th APAC HPC-AI Competition

NSCC Singapore · NCI · Firmus

3rd of 49 university teams across the Asia-Pacific region, presented on stage at SupercomputingAsia 2026 in Osaka

Lead AI Researcher: DeepSeek-R1 671B (37B active) on H100 (NSCC ASPIRE-2A+) and two 8× NVIDIA H200 nodes

Team: Josh Riantoputra (Captain), Nathan Culshaw (HPC Lead), Isaac Barnes, Giacomo Bonomi; mentor Simon Michnowicz. The work became the ICPP 2026 paper

1st place · 2025

UniHack 2025

Australia’s largest student hackathon

1st of 850+ participants and 135+ projects, youngest winner on record

Growth Garden, AI-powered personal development app

Architected the conversational AI system in Langflow with DataStax, part of the frontend, and the winning pitch

Live Demo

Research & Speaking

Less is More: Optimising SGLang Distributed DeepSeek-R1 Inference on a Two-Node H200 Cluster

Paper, first author with Nathan Culshaw · ICPP 2026

  • Venue. Accepted at Benchmarking in the Data Center (BID ’26), a workshop of the 55th International Conference on Parallel Processing. To appear in the ACM Digital Library.
  • Result. Keeping collectives on NVLink and replicating within a node beats sharding across InfiniBand: 17,417 tok/s, 81% over the 16-GPU baseline.
Read the draft

Presenting Less is More at BID ’26

Talk · Singapore, September 2026

  • Session. Alongside speakers from NVIDIA and the HPC-AI Advisory Council.

Accelerating the Future: Overcoming Bottlenecks in GPU-Based AI and HPC

Panellist, with NVIDIA and the HPC-AI Advisory Council · ICPP 2026

Experience

EvryStay

Founding and Lead Engineer · Dec 2025 to Present

  • Built the product from zero. Joined as the first and only engineer. Designed and built Eve, an AI concierge that handles guest conversations end to end for short-term rental hosts, property managers and hotels, along with the property management system integrations and AI service architecture underneath it.
  • Fundraise. The platform I built was the product investors backed: EvryStay raised A$4.5M at a A$17M post-money valuation, opening and closing the round inside a week.
  • Grew the team. Hired and now lead five full-time engineers in person. I own the architecture, the AI service boundary, code review and the final technical call, while still shipping daily: 300+ merged PRs in my first seven months.

Monash DeepNeuron & Monash eResearch

Lead AI Researcher, APAC HPC-AI Competition Team · Mar 2025 to Nov 2025

  • The problem. Maximise inference throughput for DeepSeek-R1 (671B parameters, 37B active) across two 8×H200 nodes, using infrastructure from NSCC Singapore, NCI Australia and Firmus.
  • What I found. Fewer GPUs arranged deliberately beat more GPUs arranged by default: a tuned single node (PP2 · TP4 · DP4 attention) hit 17,417 tok/s at 2.05× the per-GPU efficiency of 16 GPUs. The boring stuff mattered most: CUDA version alignment alone was worth +35%, and 40+ hand-tuned NCCL configs never beat the defaults.
  • Outcome. Presented on stage at SupercomputingAsia 2026 in Osaka. The work became the ICPP paper.

Monash DeepNeuron

AI & HPC Technical Team, Outreach · Feb 2025 to Present

  • Research. Neural Cellular Automata for modelling self-organising biological systems (see Selected Projects).
  • Outreach. Ran hands-on workshops in Victorian high schools on how deep learning models work and how to use generative AI well.

Freelance AI Engineer

Scag Australia, International Mowers · Jan 2025 to Nov 2025

  • Customer-facing AI agents. Built the Scag Mechanic and IM Advisor assistants for model comparison, troubleshooting and service recommendations. Structured proprietary product data, shipped embeddable chat widgets for web and mobile, and put brand persona and legal guardrails around both.

Full resume

Projects

EvryStay’s company agent, lives in Slack · 2026

  • What it does. Describe a feature in a Slack thread and Dummy builds a working version: real branches across three repos, a seeded full-stack preview at a permanent URL, desktop and mobile QA screenshots, and draft PRs.
  • Why. So the non-technical side of the company can see their ideas working before engineers spend time on them.
  • Guardrails. An independent review agent checks the code, sensitive changes need an allowlisted human to approve in Slack, and nothing it does can merge, deploy or touch production. Built on the open source QM harness.

Growth Garden

View

UniHack 2025 winner, team of six · 2025

  • What it is. Habit tracking as a garden you grow by getting things done. 1st of 135+ projects at Australia’s largest student hackathon.
  • My part. Architected the AI assistant in Langflow (contextual chaining, no fine-tuning), built the DataStax data model and live sync, and led the pitch to the judges.

Neural Cellular Automata

View

Monash DeepNeuron research, live at neuralca.org · 2025 to Present

  • What it is. Models that grow complex patterns from local rules, including a 3D NCA trained on time-resolved mouse embryo data to explore gastrulation-like development.
  • What I built. The 3D temporal training path—reduced data and voxel handling, dynamic frame-to-frame batches, differentiable IoU and loss instrumentation—plus PyTorch models and browser inference work.

APAC-AI-HPC-2025

View

Open experiment record behind the ICPP paper · 2025

  • What’s in it. Launch scripts, Slurm logs and workbooks for every configuration tried across two 8×H200 nodes.
  • Why it matters. Every number in the paper can be reproduced from it.

BookMarker

View

Chrome extension

  • What it does. Privacy-focused extension that remembers your exact scroll position on any webpage.

Education

Monash University

Bachelor of Engineering (Honours), Mechatronics / Bachelor of Computer Science, Algorithms & Software

High Distinction WAM · Dean’s Award for Academic Excellence · Top of cohort, FIT1045 · Deferred 2026 to lead engineering at EvryStay

2025 to Present

Elwood College

VCE, Dux of Mathematical Methods

2019 to 2024

AIE

Certificate III in Information Technology, completed alongside VCE

2023 to 2024

Harvard University

CS50x, Introduction to Computer Science, completed at 16

2022

Machine Learning Specialization/ Stanford / Andrew Ng

Deep Learning Specialization/ DeepLearning.AI