Liam Clark

Profile

I’m an engineer, founder, and tinkerer at heart who enjoys turning ambitious ideas into systems that work in the real world. I’m especially drawn to the intersection of software and hardware: ML compilers and distributed training, embedded firmware and custom electronics, and the cloud services that connect everything together.

I’m at my best in small, high-ownership teams, taking a problem from first principles to something fast, reliable, and genuinely useful.

Experience

Founding Engineer

DeepGate Limited

Sep 2025 - Present Cape Town

Building the compiler infrastructure and model tooling needed to run useful ML models on devices with very limited compute and memory.
Created a platform for compiling and benchmarking models across different hardware and runtime constraints, and built and continue to manage the cloud infrastructure that runs it.
Work across model design, quantisation, memory planning, compiler internals, and embedded deployment.

Founder

Sensify (Pty) Ltd

Aug 2018 - Present Cape Town

Started Sensify with my co-founder to make remote water-treatment infrastructure easier to understand, monitor, and maintain.
Worked across the complete product stack, including PCBs, firmware, sensors, telemetry, field tooling, dashboards, analytics, alerting, and device management.
Helped take the system from early prototypes to long-running deployments at hospitals, schools, farms, shopping centres, and other facilities.

Machine Learning Engineer

InstaDeep

Jun 2024 - Sep 2025 Cape Town

Worked alongside research teams to make large JAX training and inference workloads faster, more scalable, and more efficient.
Optimised transformer workloads across GPU and TPU clusters using model sharding, accelerator-aware implementations, and topology-aware parallelism.
Contributed to Laila and was responsible for pretraining the NTv3 model family, while growing into technical direction, project scoping, review, and mentoring.

Software Engineer, ML Frameworks

InstaDeep

Feb 2024 - Jun 2024 Cape Town

Built JAX systems for large-scale multi-agent reinforcement learning on GPU and TPU clusters.
Helped turn experimental research code into reliable training, evaluation, and experiment infrastructure for Mava and Sable.

Computer Engineer

Mineral Services Engineering

Sep 2020 - Feb 2024 Cape Town

Worked at the intersection of electronics, embedded software, UAVs, data systems, and machine learning for mineral-exploration R&D.
Built systems spanning custom hardware, firmware, embedded Linux, telemetry, geophysical data processing, analytics, and deep learning.
Led technical workstreams from early prototypes through manufacturing and field deployment, while supporting hiring and mentoring.

Embedded Systems Engineer

Private Client

Jan 2020 - Aug 2020 Cape Town

Designed and delivered a bespoke aircraft instrumentation and data-acquisition system from prototype to production.
Built the electronics, firmware, test tooling, and manufacturing handoff for a system operating in a demanding avionics environment.

Lecturing Assistant

University of Cape Town

Jan 2020 - Jul 2020 Cape Town

Helped students turn engineering ideas into working designs through practical tutorials, debugging support, and technical mentorship.

Software Developer Intern

weFix

Jan 2017 - Mar 2017 Cape Town

Got my first production software experience building Python and Clojure APIs and improving internal data systems.

Skills

ML systems

ML compilers, JAX, distributed training, transformer optimisation, model sharding, GPU/TPU systems, quantisation

Software engineering

C, Rust, Go, Python, full-stack web development, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure on AWS and GCP

Embedded & edge

Arm Cortex-M, RISC-V, Xtensa/ESP32, embedded Linux, firmware and device drivers, PCB design, sensors, telemetry, hardware bring-up

Leadership & delivery

Zero-to-one product development, system architecture, technical direction, mentoring, manufacturing and field deployment