Portfolio / 2026

Software Engineer

Bellevue, Washington

A geometric Aegean city aligned with a rising sun

Plate 01 / Ambition needs systems

Engineer · Researcher · Builder

Brett Haas

I build intelligent systems that hold up in the real world.

Full-stack software engineer building reliable, intelligent products across web, mobile, and AI systems.

Explore projects
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01 / Flight log

Experience

From research and evaluation to production mobile systems: a path shaped by rigor, iteration, and useful outcomes.

  1. 01

    University of Virginia

    ML Research Assistant

    Inference-time activation-steering research focused on language-model visual bias.

    Nov 2025 – May 2026Charlottesville, VA

    • Built an inference-time activation steering pipeline for LLMs in PyTorch and NNSight, intervening on residual-stream activations across Qwen models with frozen weights.
    • Engineered a filtering pipeline over 616K+ COCO captions using lexical scoring, next-token probability disparities, and RMSE-based layer selection.
    • Reduced RMS next-token bias 28.9% while preserving output quality across 1,000 samples.
    • PyTorch
    • NNSight
    • Activation Steering
    • Interpretability

  2. 02

    Scale AI

    GenAI Technical Advisor Intern · SEAL

    Frontier-model safety, evaluation, and agent reliability work on the Scale AI SEAL team.

    Jun 2025 – Dec 2025Remote

    • Red-teamed frontier LLMs in Scale AI SEAL, identifying jailbreaks, unsafe behaviors, prompt-injection risks, and agent security failure modes.
    • Produced RLHF-style code evaluation data for complex software-engineering and competitive-programming tasks.
    • Improved system prompts and tool use in agentic workflows to increase model safety, consistency, and multi-step reliability.
    • LLMs
    • RLHF
    • Model Safety
    • Evaluation

  3. 03

    Refraction Innovation Hub

    Software Engineer Intern

    Cross-platform nutrition and food-recognition product development across mobile, AI, and cloud systems.

    Jun 2025 – Aug 2025McLean, VA

    • Architected a cross-platform food recognition app in TypeScript and React Native with OpenAI multimodal APIs.
    • Deployed authentication through AWS Cognito with storage on AWS RDS and Azure SQL across iOS and Android.
    • Improved load time 55% and reached 99.5% crash-free sessions through memory optimizations and lazy-loading monitored with AWS CloudWatch.
    • TypeScript
    • React Native
    • OpenAI
    • AWS

  4. 04

    University of Virginia

    B.S. in Computer Science

    GPA: 3.7Relevant coursework: Computer Systems, Data Structures and Algorithms, Software Engineering, Cybersecurity, Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning

    May 2026Charlottesville, VA

02 / Field studies

Projects

Three builds across computer vision, real-time collaboration, and language-model research. Choose a panel to open the complete case study on its own page.

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03 / Skills

The skills behind the flight.

My work sits where software engineering, machine learning, and product judgment meet.

I like difficult systems with visible stakes: steering model behavior, testing frontier agents, and shipping cross-platform products whose performance can be measured—not merely described.

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04 / Next horizon

Connect with me.

Always open to a conversation about interesting ideas, thoughtful products, and the systems that make them work.