Ines Varela
Research engineer · Machine learning
Research engineer with eight years across a university lab, a robotics start-up and an applied AI team. I build evaluation tooling and take models from first experiment to production.
Experience
Senior Research Engineer
2023 – now
Applied AI team, Example Labs
I lead evaluation for language model features used by about two million people.
Machine Learning Engineer
2020 – 2023
Acme Robotics
Trained and shipped perception models for warehouse robots.
Research Assistant
2018 – 2020
Vision Lab, Example University
Studied how image models fail when the data shifts.
Teaching and talks
Ongoing
Independent
Guest lectures on evaluation and a yearly workshop for new ML engineers.
Selected work
Open evaluation toolkit
A small Python library for writing model evaluations as plain test files, with reports the whole team can read.
Retrieval that admits doubt
A study of when a retrieval-augmented model should answer "I'm not sure", with a benchmark of 3,000 hard questions.
Small models on small devices
Distilled a speech model to run offline on mid-range phones without losing the words people use most.
Education
MSc, Artificial Intelligence
Example University · Thesis on robustness under distribution shift
2016 – 2018
BSc, Computer Science
Example University · First-class honours
2013 – 2016
Awards and credentials
Best workshop paper
Robustness workshop, 2025
Graduate research fellowship
Example Foundation, 2017
Evals your team will actually run
ML engineering meetup, 2024
Guest lecturer, Applied Machine Learning
Example University, 2023 – now
Professional machine learning engineer
Cloud certification, 2022
Reviewer
Two machine learning conferences, 2021 – now
Skills
Python, PyTorch, JAX
Evaluation design and statistics
Distillation and quantisation
Data pipelines and SQL