I post-train task-specific & agentic models.

Hi! I'm David Podolskyi ✌️ Software & ML Engineer @ Apple, where I post-train task-specialist models that replace frontier-model calls: soft-verified SFT, on-policy RL, reward design, evals. Previously: ML research & thesis @ Harvard Medical, President of TUM.ai, and five years of ML & data engineering across Infineon, BMW, and startups.

Outside of training runs: biology, physics, and maths, designing products people actually want to use, and an unreasonable amount of pickleball.

Explore more here

Selected work

Four things that show how I build.

  • Post-Trained Task Specialists @ Apple

    Soft-verified-generation SFT per SERA and on-policy RL with SDPO, training small specialists that replace frontier-model calls at sub-dollar-per-fix cost. The task they learn: resolving internal issues into PR-ready code diffs, with a ModernBERT classifier fine-tuned on ~10K tickets (85% top-3 accuracy) routing the work.

  • RL from Scratch: Pokémon TCG (Kaggle Silver)

    Top 3% of 6,892 teams (Silver). One of the biggest Kaggle challenges ever. Agent: a policy/value transformer trained by behaviour cloning, then PPO against a self-play league, then per-deck LoRA specialists fused back into the base. At match time it plans with determinized tree search over a belief model, on 2 CPUs with no network.

  • Neural Rendering for Neurosurgery @ Harvard Medical School

    My Bachelor's thesis: aligning what a surgeon's camera sees with preoperative brain scans, using NeRFs as differentiable scene representations for intraoperative registration.

  • TUM.ai & Community

    Ex-President of TUM.ai for over two years, joining early and helping build it from a handful of students into one of Europe's best-known student AI initiatives: 300+ members, summits, hackathons, startup coaching, and industry projects. Also co-organized Europe's largest defense hackathon (400+ participants).

Work

  1. Company
    Apple
    Date
    Role
    Software & Machine Learning Engineer
  2. Company
    Apple
    Date
    Role
    Software & ML Engineer Intern
  3. Company
    UTUM, Venture Labs Software/AI
    Date
    Role
    Project Manager
  4. Company
    Harvard Medical School
    Date
    Role
    Machine Learning Researcher - Brain Surgery Imaging
  5. Company
    AISBACH
    Date
    Role
    Tech Consultant - ML & Software Engineering
  6. Company
    Infineon Technologies
    Date
    Role
    AI Solutions Engineer
  7. Company
    Expleo Group
    Date
    Role
    Data Engineer for IoT Systems
  8. Company
    TURTLE GmbH
    Date
    Role
    Data Engineer & Science Consultant
  9. Company
    AI Driller
    Date
    Role
    Junior Data Scientist & ML Engineer

Volunteering & Social Engagement

  1. Company
    TUM.ai
    Date
    Role
    President
  2. Company
    TUM.ai
    Date
    Role
    Industry Department - Team Lead & Mentor
  3. Company
    UnternehmerTUM & AppliedAI
    Date
    Role
    Decentralized Help Hotline for Ukrainian refugees
  4. Company
    TUM.ai
    Date
    Role
    Venture Department - Team Lead
  5. Company
    TUM.ai
    Date
    Role
    Events Organiser & ML Consultant