Chicago, IL / Open to work
Serial co-founder and two-time VC-backed startup CTO. Applied AI: agentic systems and edge inference.
I build AI that has to work in production, not in a notebook.
01 / the claim
A platform is a demo on day one and an uptime problem on day ninety. I have taken one from the first commit to about twenty customer deployments, which is a different job than the one people pitch.
GPT-dependent detections moved to in-house models, and one feature's spend dropped 6×. A new segmentation model took inference from 400 ms to 26 ms and GPU load at five stations from 100% to about 30%. Same accuracy requirement, different bill.
ISO 27001:2022 from a standing start. SOC 2 Type I readiness. RLS multi-tenant Postgres. Hardened Linux on x86, micro-x86 and ARM. Three-minute median first response. Upkeep is hard, and it is also most of the job.
As the team went from solo to nine across time zones, my week went from 80% code to 20%. The job became getting other people to their best work, and owning my mistakes out loud so they could own theirs.
said about working with me
Bazyl has a habit of making complicated things look suspiciously easy. The kind of person you want around when things break, ideas get weird, or someone says, “That’s probably impossible.” He’ll either find a solution or make the problem regret showing up.
Sherif OkunadeWeb Developer
Passionate technology leader who is constantly geeking out over the newest tech releases and figuring out how they can solve real problems.
Matthew BronsteinHead of Engineering
A natural mentor who empowers engineers. I started exploring systems programming and Rust because of an impressive project I saw on his GitHub.
Jesse OnyekweluWeb Developer
His depth of knowledge, resourcefulness, and unwavering commitment to excellence make him … someone you can always count on.
Oshoke OyatiWeb Development Lead
02 / work
Write your UI once in Elm and decide at deploy time where each piece runs: browser, server, or both. Pure Elm virtual DOM, a diff that runs anywhere, a JSON wire protocol and a dependency-free browser patcher. No kernel code, no fork. This page runs on it.
| 1 | Pure Elm vdom, diff, wire protocol, event routing | done |
| 2 | Browser patcher, applies patches to the real DOM | done |
| 3 | Full HTML/SVG/MathML, keyed lists, effects, runtime | next |
| 4 | Server runtime over a websocket | planned |
| 5 | Generated, compiler-checked encoders for shared types | planned |
| 6 | Session snapshots and typed migrations across deploys | planned |
An MCP server that connects local and remote Obsidian vaults to desktop AI tools: multi-vault switching, graph analysis, hybrid search and backlinks.
https://github.com/bazylhorsey/obsidian-mcp-serverA proposal to add typed stdin prompts to the Rust standard library (rust-lang/rust#117852, RFC 3196). What upstream actually feels like from the outside.
https://github.com/bazylhorsey/prompt-rustA Rust take on Phoenix LiveView, built to learn the browser-versus-server trade-off from the implementer's side. The only way to have an opinion about it.
Hayleigh Thompson's Gleam web framework. Four open PRs, including a 337-line fix for server component context subscriptions and a CI workflow for main. Upkeep is hard. Apparently I do it anyway.
https://github.com/lustre-labs/lustre/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3AbazylhorseyThe open-source NVR. A merged fix to its auth cookie pattern and an open one for a shared-memory leak on skipped frames. Same class of bug as the day job, in someone else's codebase.
https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3AbazylhorseyA ChatGPT 3.0-era Lovable, presented at the OpenAI Hackathon in Chicago, 2022. Kept because it is funny and it was early.
https://github.com/bazylhorsey/astonish03 / path
Techstars '22, then a $4M seed led by Rackhouse. Took the platform from first commit to about twenty customer deployments across five product lines, then built the plug-and-play inspection product behind the pivot: installs in a day, works with the cameras and systems a site already has.
Grew engineering from solo to nine across time zones. As CISO, built the ISMS from nothing to ISO 27001:2022 and SOC 2 Type I readiness. Principal investigator on a $1M+ DoD-funded MxD safety AI project.
Smart-locker and mobility IoT, now Accessa, backed by Jason Calacanis with a $1M pre-seed. Part-time through college, CTO from 2021, leading a team of five. Built the BLE SDKs and mobile integrations behind the 2020 Smart Locker launch, which became the core business.
Led the hardware too: our own System on Module with BLE and LTE for the lockers, and the APIs that wrapped it. The software was the easy half.
First startup out of Buena Vista's Foundry incubator. Wound it down in 2021 and brought two of its engineers to Koloni, which I count as the best outcome any of my companies had. Earlier: the app for Match-Learn-Launch, a $175,000 Google.org Impact Challenge winner.
Dean's List. President of the Robotics Club. Collegiate wrestler, which explains more about how I run engineering than any conference talk does.
04 / writing & talking
Research
Frontiers in Sustainability 5:1416964. Modeled roughly 50% lower emissions by rerouting livestock between brooders and finishers with a Gurobi optimization over distance, exclusivity, and capacity. The notebook is public, which is the point of publishing.
Podcasts
Academic burnout through to running engineering at Arvist. Why scrappy beats flashy when you are building a team, and what most CTOs get wrong about leadership. The episode title is the whole review.
youtu.be/mk7CKtatU8UEncord's show, hosted by their co-founder. Going deep on AI in logistics: what it takes to get a model out of a notebook and onto a dock, why the old boring methods still win more often than the shiny new thing, and where quality assurance in warehousing is heading.
deep learning leadersPosts
05 / off the clock
Chicago punk / midwest emo. Somewhere between loud and sincere.
The rest of this site is the day job. This is the night one. The other off-hours constant: four years as a Big with Big Brothers Big Sisters.
06 / contact
Forward deployed and applied AI roles, technical leadership, or a deployment that will not stay up. Chicago-based, happy to be on site with customers. I read all of it and I answer.