nathan.rs
Greetings visitor! This is the website and digital garden of Nathan Barry. I’m an engineer and researcher interested in systems and machine learning. I love working on hard problems with great people. Occasionally, I write about what I’m working on. Below are a few selected blog posts:
For information about me, below are a few things I’ve been doing:
| Currently | |
|---|---|
| May 2026 - Present | An AI Engineer at Zed, working on post-training code autocomplete models (and other stuff) |
| Previously | |
|---|---|
| May 2026 | Finished my Master’s of Science in CS @ UT Austin |
| Aug 2025 - May 2026 | A Graduate Researcher at UT Austin, working on inference optimization for diffusion language models (and previously, distributed training) |
| Feb 2026 | Won both the Neo Prize and the Most Creative Prize at TreeHacks 2026. Built Diffuji, a diffusion-powered instant camera |
| Oct 2025 | Placed for the Play-Do Prize at Cal Hacks 2025. Built Curserve, a coding agent serving framework with faster end-to-end generation |
| May 2025 - Aug 2025 | A Machine Learning Intern at Apple, working on time-series forecasting for predictive autoscaling |
| Jun 2025 | Attended Y Combinator’s first AI Startup School (and other summer events) |
| May 2025 | Finished my Bachelor’s of Science in CS and Math @ UT Austin |
| Nov 2021 - Jan 2025 | A Software Engineer at multiple startups, doing Rust and TypeScript full-stack development and Python machine learning and robotics work |
| Feb 2024 - Sep 2024 | An Undergraduate Researcher at UT Austin, working on efficient exact-match search for LLM dataset contamination detection |
| May 2022 | Participated in the Z fellows program |
✵ ✵ ✵
I think that the spirit of my life philosophy is tersely captured by the following quote (which I keep a list of), that I came across in the book The Empire of Pain.
“I believe that a man should strive for only one thing in life, and that is to have a touch of greatness” — Félix Martí-Ibáñez
While I like the quote, it is incomplete individually. The grand and aspirational must always be conjoined with a dose of conscientiousness.
“The thoughts of others
Were light and fleeting,
Of lovers’ meeting
Or luck or fame.
Mine were of trouble
And mine were steady;
So I was ready
When trouble came.” — A.E. Housman
Outside of school and work, I enjoy reading, pickleball, badminton, climbing, pool, ping-pong, hiking, social dance, playing the guitar, and photography!
In addition, here is a list of some personal feats I’ve done (featuring the impressive and the useless).
| Event | Record |
|---|---|
| Mile | 4:28 |
| 2 Mile | 9:51 |
| 5k | 15:56 |
| Bench | 275 lbs |
| Bouldering Grade | V8 |
| Starcraft 2 Rank | Diamond (Protoss) |
| Balls Juggled | 4 |
| Bowling Score | 203 (my proudest one!) |
Lastly, I have plenty of super cool and great friends! Check out their websites! Alex Kranias, Daniel Kasabov-Nouvion, Dorsa Rohani, Annie Hu, Manal Sultan, Sid Sabhnani, Arpan Dhatt, Nate Williams.