# Experience

> Brett Haas — research, model evaluation, and production software experience.

## ML Research Assistant, University of Virginia

- Period: Nov 2025 – May 2026
- Location: Charlottesville, VA
- Technologies: PyTorch, NNSight, Activation Steering, Interpretability

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

- 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.

## GenAI Technical Advisor Intern, Scale AI

- Period: Jun 2025 – Dec 2025
- Team: SEAL
- Location: Remote
- Technologies: LLMs, RLHF, Model Safety, Evaluation

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

- 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.

## Software Engineer Intern, Refraction Innovation Hub

- Period: Jun 2025 – Aug 2025
- Location: McLean, VA
- Technologies: TypeScript, React Native, OpenAI, AWS

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

- 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.

## Education

### B.S. in Computer Science, University of Virginia

- Graduation: May 2026
- Location: Charlottesville, VA
- GPA: 3.7
- Focus areas: Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Machine Learning, Software Engineering
- Coursework: Computer Systems, Data Structures and Algorithms, Software Engineering, Cybersecurity, Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning