Zach Preator
Clearfield, UT, United States0
Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Cricut
Machine Learning Engineer with 5+ years building production AI systems, from LLM-integrated APIs to large-scale model serving on Kubernetes, combining strong Python development with MLOps practices and physics-based engineering fundamentals.
AI Fluency
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Q&A
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Projects
T
Twitter Markov Chain Bot
Created a bot that scrapes twitter posts to compile new and ‘funny’ twitter posts daily. The project was written in Python and used some open source packages like Tweepy (twitter API for python). Markov Chains are also used to group words by association and give weights to more likely combos. This leads to more ‘readable’ tweets, but the results are largely just for fun, and rarely make sense. I have plans to do more language processing to form more sensible tweets.
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Runalysis
Personal running-form analyzer using pose estimation and point tracking
Applies YOLO pose estimation and point tracking to treadmill footage to extract time-series biomechanical signals (cadence, stride length, ground contact time) and classifies running form with an interpretable Random Forest model.
Experience
Senior Machine Learning Engineer
CricutAug 2023 — Present · Utah, United States
Architected production APIs integrating LLMs into backend services and fine-tuned CLIP on real and synthetic data for semantic image search deployed to millions of users via AWS EKS. Built large-scale data pipelines with Apache Spark in AWS Glue for model training and established MLOps workflows using Docker, GitHub Actions, and ArgoCD. Created an internal model-evaluation platform in Streamlit for interactive analysis and stakeholder communication.
Mechanical Engineering Intern
AutolivJun 2020 — Aug 2023 · Ogden, Utah
Applied industrial statistics and design of experiments to manufacturing and test data. Built XGBoost time-series models on sensor data to predict physical test curves and designed a semi-automated YOLO-based data annotation pipeline for manufacturing imagery. Developed a CNN-based critical point detection model that reduced analysis time by 80% and shipped a full-stack time-series anomaly detection system with Flask, SQLite, and Plotly handling real-time data from thousands of test deployments.
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Engineering Intern
Design Automation Associates IncApr 2019 — Jun 2020 · Rexburg, Idaho
Built C# tooling to automate workflows via CAD APIs and developed an AR Android app for 3D assembly visualization.
Tire Technician
Les Schwab Tire CentersAug 2018 — Apr 2019
Learned valuable customer communication skills and gained hard work ethic.
Education
Colorado State University Global
Master's degree in Computer science and artificial intelligence
Jun 2021 — Jun 2024
GPA: 3.84
Colorado State University Global
Master of Science - MS in Machine Learning & AI
Jun 2021 — Jun 2024
Credentials
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Skills
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)Agentic WorkflowsAPI DevelopmentLarge Language Models (LLM)Recommender SystemsSearchCLIPAmazon Web Services (AWS)MLOpsCloud StrategyTensorFlowObject DetectionOpenCVPresentationsImage ProcessingComputer Vision