Hello · London, UK · call me Filip

Thien Phu (Filip) Nguyen Xuan

Founding engineer at siliXon. I build AI systems end to end and get my clarity from shipping, not speculating. The work compounds.

14 years of compounding.
2 hackathon golds.
3 native languages.

scroll ↓

01

Story

The short version: software → data → AI agents → silicon. The pattern underneath: get into a harder room every year, and earn the seat.

I started in data: GPS clustering at a logistics startup, churn models over 2.5 million renewals at The AA. Then I became employee #1 at Amplifyr and spent nine months shipping production agent systems: a 25-tool MCP server, multi-stage LLM pipelines, eval harnesses wired into CI.

Now I'm a founding engineer at siliXon. There was no shortcut to it: study, build, ship, repeat, until the seat was earned. Most of the work is putting the reps in and getting out of your own way.

On the side, I do RLHF work for frontier labs. I help train the models that power tools like the one that helped build this site.

  1. 2010: Mathematical Kangaroo finalist, Poland, the first of three years running. The origin story starts here.
  2. 2012: 3rd place, mathematics state olympics. Also repping the school at chess and table tennis.
  3. 2013: Staszic, Warsaw: Poland's best high school. Junior maths olympiad circuit through 2016.
  4. 2018: New country, new system: four STEM A-levels in Reading, UK.
  5. 2020: Exeter CS. AI society committee, basketball society committee, university basketball player.
  6. 2024: BSc done: ML dissertation on cyberbullying detection. Data scientist at Staxy; Exeter × Berkeley bootcamp.
  7. 2025: The AA: churn models across 2.5M renewals, £100m+ in play. First hire at Amplifyr. Gold #1 at Imperial.
  8. 2026: Founding engineer at siliXon. Gold #2. Anthropic-certified, twice. Still moving.

2026 Founding engineer at siliXon. Gold #2. Anthropic-certified, twice. Still moving.

How I decide

I rarely know the whole path from A to B. I always know the next step that provably gets me closer, and I take it today.

Why I build first

Building gives me clarity that speculating never will. Shipped code teaches faster than any amount of thinking about shipping code.

How it compounds

Test fast, keep what survives, write down what died. Every rep makes the next path clearer. That is the whole strategy, and it has not lost yet.

02

Work

AI-native companies run on different physics. This is the job I build for.

New physics

Software used to scale at near-zero marginal cost. AI products spend tokens with every user, ours and our clients', so cost scales with usage and efficiency becomes a product feature, not an afterthought.

Lean by design

Fewer people now run the whole company. Every seat carries real weight, and every engineer touches product, infrastructure and cost at once.

The leverage

Companies used to hire people to do jobs. Now the margin lives in context engineering and how the systems are set up. Understanding AI end to end is how you scale smartly instead of expensively.

Amplifyr

First Hire, AI Engineer · Oct 2025 to 2026

amplifyr.me

A production knowledge brain for every client.

Architecture of the Company Brain: five knowledge sources (Slack, Drive, Gmail, Notion and GitHub) feed an ingest pipeline, then hybrid BM25 plus vector retrieval with RRF fusion, exposed through an MCP server with 25+ tools that powers agents and client dashboards.

mcp: FastMCP server, 25+ tools, Cognito auth, per-client row-level security

Problem
Amplifyr helps brands win AI search: measuring how ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews cite and recommend them, then optimizing that visibility (GEO). Inside that mission, client knowledge sat scattered across Slack, Drive, Gmail, Notion and GitHub: unsearchable, unauditable, unusable by agents.
Built
The Company Brain: a custom MCP server (FastMCP, 25+ tools) doing hybrid BM25 + vector retrieval with RRF fusion over Aurora Postgres/pgvector and Bedrock Titan embeddings, deployed on Fargate with Cognito auth and per-client row-level security. Plus multi-stage LangGraph content agents with automated fact-checking, and 15 client-facing analytics visualisations in Next.js.
Trade-offs
Hybrid retrieval over pure vector: BM25 catches the exact-term queries embeddings miss, RRF fuses without tuning a weighted sum. Deterministic record/replay harness over live-LLM tests, so sub-agent regressions surface in CI, not in front of clients.
Outcome
In production as internal infrastructure: the whole team and its AI agents run on it daily, boosting operational efficiency across every client engagement, with retrieval-quality and claim-fidelity eval gates wired into CI.

The full record

siliXon

Founding Engineer · 2026 to now

AI-designed electronics: natural language in, manufacturable hardware out. The new chapter, and the deep dive lands here once the first work ships.

Outlier (Scale AI)

AI Training Specialist, RLHF · Sep 2024 to now, part time

Human-feedback data for frontier labs, specialising in coding and mathematics: 20+ projects, 500+ tasks, ranking model outputs and diagnosing reasoning failures from the inside.

The AA

Commercial Data Analyst · Mar to Sep 2025

Analysis across 2.5M+ annual renewals with £100m+ in play: churn models (scikit-learn, XGBoost) at +12% accuracy over 300k targeted leads, KPI pipelines in Databricks saving 30% of analyst hours.

Staxy

Data Scientist · Jul 2024 to Jan 2025

Large-scale GPS data on AWS: DBSCAN and HDBSCAN clustering plus a transport-mode model at 70% accuracy, cutting average delivery times 15%.

03

Lab

Self-directed shipping, in public: side projects and weekend wins. This is the receipts section.

antman :: oos equity curve
AntMan out-of-sample equity curve vs buy-and-hold benchmark

AntMan

Proves: agent-harness design + eval rigor

A multi-agent quant research system structurally biased toward disconfirmation. Dozens of scout agents hunt for trading edge; high-effort skeptic and audit agents try to kill every candidate; a sealed 70/30 holdout decides what survives. ~12,000 configs searched, exactly one strategy made it through.

OOS Sharpe 0.77 vs 0.82 buy-and-hold. The real edge: max drawdown −34.9% vs −63.9%.

Python · multi-agent orchestration · sealed-holdout evals

github.com/FilipNguyen/AntMan
retention-lab :: 48h simulation
Retention Lab dashboard: simulated user cohorts and notification A/B test
Retention Lab: agent identity and 48-hour routine detail
Retention Lab: two-proportion z-test results

Retention Lab

Proves: agent simulation, memory systems, evals-as-product

Simulate your users as AI agents and A/B-test notifications before a real person ever sees one. Agents get identities and 48-hour routines; Claude writes contextual notifications live; a Mubit memory layer learns across runs; a two-proportion z-test calls the winner.

Next.js · Claude API · Mubit · TypeScript

github.com/FilipNguyen/Sims

Weekend wins

1stMozart AI × OpenAI × ElevenLabs · Mar 2026

Marmalade

Real-time music collaboration on the web: 20ms-latency live jamming, key & beat matching, git-style session versioning. Sketch to 1st in 28 hours.

The judges joined the jam.live ↗repo ↗

1stImperial College Fintech Hackathon · Oct 2025

WOMPOO

Privacy-first, real-time scam and fraud detection for families. Beat 21 ventures from Imperial, Oxford, UCL, KCL and ETH Zürich.

Prize: £3,000

Judge2026

UCL VibeHack

The other side of the table: judging from the chair after winning from the floor.

Invited

More from the lab

EasternExe : the AI workspace for group trips. Join the live demo trip. Trashbot : self-improving agent harness that learns from 80,000 real coding-agent runs. Plus a RAG chatbot at the Microsoft × NVIDIA Copilot Stack hackathon.

Origin artifact

BSc dissertation (2024): ML for cyberbullying detection on X. Benchmarked 9 classifiers on TF-IDF features: stacking ensemble hit 0.82 across accuracy, precision, recall and F1 (ROC-AUC 0.89), with SMOTE + class weighting lifting minority-class recall 0.68 → 0.81. Protective AI, round one. WOMPOO was round two.

the full build log: every project, production system and feature →

04

Field Map

The 2026 AI-engineering field, mapped the way I actually work it. Emerald pads mark territories where I've shipped, not just studied.

★ = differentiating in 2026 hiring data · emerald pad = shipped territory · shipped tag = production receipts, plain = working knowledge

role coverage. startup rules: you run every roadmap at once

AI Engineer

Company Brain · agent pipelines · evals wired into CI

Frontend

15 client dashboards at Amplifyr · this site

Backend

FastMCP server (25+ tools) · Fargate services · Cognito auth

Full Stack

Retention Lab · WOMPOO · idea to deployed, solo or small team

AI & Data Scientist

churn models, +12% accuracy over 2.5M renewals · GPS clustering

Data Engineer

Iceberg lake · Athena · ingestion pipelines · Redis cache

AWS / Cloud

Lambda · Fargate/ECS · Bedrock · Athena · Cognito, all in prod

MLOps-adjacent

record/replay test harness · eval gates in CI · tracing

highlights, not the ceiling. the full build log lives on the projects page →

the same map, from the command line

filip@london : zsh

$ filip --ai

LLM agents · LangChain / LangGraph · MCP · RAG & hybrid retrieval · RLHF · evals (Inspect AI) · scikit-learn · XGBoost

$ filip --build

Python · TypeScript · SQL · C / C++ / Java · React / Next.js · interactive data-viz

$ filip --infra

AWS (Lambda, Fargate/ECS, Athena, Bedrock, Cognito) · Aurora/pgvector · Apache Iceberg · Redis · Docker · K8s · CI/CD

$ filip --foundations

BSc Computer Science, Exeter · algorithms & data structures · discrete maths · dissertation: ML cyberbullying detection, 9 classifiers, stacking 0.82 F1

$ filip --speak

English · Tiếng Việt · Polski, all native

$

05

Human

Three languages at home: English, Vietnamese, Polish. One city: London. One sport played since school: basketball, university player, society committee, and still watching religiously. Fancy a shootaround? →

Music and code are the same hobby now: the last hackathon I won was a real-time jamming tool, and the judges played it live on stage.

My defaults: say yes to the hard room, out-prepare it, and repost my teammates' wins louder than my own. The certificates keep stacking because the studying never stopped: Anthropic AI Fluency, Claude Code in Action, whatever's next.

The giving-back thread runs just as far: volunteering at a Vietnamese summer camp in Poland, school volunteering in the UK, mentoring on sports day. Judge's chair included.

06

Contact

Let's build.

Building something where AI touches atoms? Tell me what it does.