Principal DevOps Engineer | AI Safety Researcher | Web3 Builder
- 🏆 ETHDenver 2025 Winner - Won $4,500 with TrustDAI, a decentralized AI trust and verification system
- 🔬 AI Safety Researcher - Principal DevOps Engineer at METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research), working on AI evaluation frameworks and GPU cluster deployment, contributing to effective altruism-aligned AI safety initiatives
- 🛡️ Security & Identity Expert - 15+ years in large-scale automation, DevOps, and security, specializing in decentralized identity and human-agent verification systems
- 🌱 Currently Building - Human-centric on-chain agent marketplace with decentralized identity verification using palm/iris biometrics
- 💡 Research Interests - AI agent frameworks, decentralized identity (DID), privacy-preserving data storage, and Web3-AI convergence
Decentralized AI Agent Ecosystem: Building systems where AI agents verify human identities (via Humanity Protocol/Worldcoin), process interactions securely, and monetize encrypted data through blockchain marketplaces.
Key Technologies:
- Agent Frameworks: LangChain, RecallNet, Fetch.ai integration
- Identity Verification: Humanity Protocol (palm scans), Worldcoin (iris scans)
- Data Storage: Arweave, Ocean Protocol, IPFS with encryption
- ML Operations: Weights & Biases for experiment tracking and model management
- Infrastructure: Kubernetes, OpenTofu/Terraform, Spacelift for CI/CD, AWS/Azure for scalable AI workloads
- METR - Contributed heavily to open-sourcing Hawk (Inspect extension for GPU clusters) with Terraform and Python DevOps architecture, architected EKS deployments for AI threat research
- UC Berkeley MyShake - Migrated legacy infrastructure to IaC, reduced bugs by 99%, built CI/CD pipelines
- Okta - Built security DevOps team, implemented PKI audit infrastructure discovering 50%+ idle admin accounts, created automated certificate management systems
- 15+ years in DevOps, cloud infrastructure, and security automation
- 📊 99% Bug Reduction - Infrastructure migration at UC Berkeley
- 🔒 Major Security Improvements - PKI infrastructure and automated certificate management at Okta
- 🚀 Open Source Contributor - Co-founder of Chatresearch (700+ member non-profit) and VHSpace.org
- ⚡ Infrastructure Optimization - Reduced deployment times from months to days through automated CI/CD
- 📫 Email: [email protected]
- 🐦 Twitter: @ballew
- 💼 LinkedIn: ballew
- 🏗️ Organizations: Spookyfox | Chatresearch | VHSpace.org
Infrastructure & DevOps
AI & ML
Blockchain & Web3
Monitoring & Observability
"Building the infrastructure for trustworthy AI-human interactions on the blockchain"