Thomas Bale. Builder · Athlete · Engineer.

Veloworks Components

Co-founded and operated a business producing 3D-printed performance cycling components.

• ▸Owned sponsorship, marketing, technical, and financial operations across the season.
• ▸Designed and iterated prototypes before taking any of them to a paying customer.
• ▸Sole technical lead on the Veloworks website (TypeScript).

University of Bristol

Teaching the next cohort of CS students across the modules I sat in one year ago.

• ▸Delivering lectures and running workshop exercises for first- and second-year modules.
• ▸Mentoring a small team through their year-long Software Engineering Project.
• ▸Helping students in Computer Systems A and Programming Languages & Computation workshops.

University of Bristol · School of Brain, Behaviour and Health

Built a scalable ML workflow for generating photorealistic, emotional faces for psychological research.

• ▸Synthesised faces expressing the 6 basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise) at controlled intensities.
• ▸Pipelines designed for downstream psychological experimentation in the School of Brain, Behaviour and Health.

Personal-finance EdTech startup

Turned down a DeepMind internship to build a personal-finance ed-tech startup for young adults.

• ▸Chose the risk of building over a safe career path: believed it was unacceptable for young adults to lack financial literacy with today's tech landscape.
• ▸Drove end-to-end technical execution as the technical co-founder — architected and built the app and website from scratch, led user testing, validation, and rapid iteration cycles.
• ▸Mastered rapid iteration, lean product development, and AI-assisted programming at speed while running user-facing experiments.
• ▸Forward-looking: now leveraging these hard-earned lessons about startup pitfalls and technical agility to build the next venture with a distinct advantage.

UKSCC · ISC'25

Represented the UK at the ISC Student Cluster Competition. Fine-tuned Llama 8B on 8×H100 and optimised OpenMX on 208 cores.

• ▸Optimised OpenMX and Llama fine-tunes on a 208-core, 8×H100 cluster.
• ▸Worked with SLURM, OpenMP, MPI, CUDA, and a stack of HPC libraries (LAPACK, BLAS, ScaLAPACK, FFTW, ELPA, OpenBLAS, Intel MKL).
• ▸Explored LoRA, QDoRA, DoRA, Transformer Engine, FP8, and FlashAttention 3 for the Llama 8B track.

DigitalU3 (u3core)

Engineered an ML system with a strong focus on efficiency and scalability, paired with a real product surface.

• ▸AGILE workflow — sprints, code reviews, iterative delivery against product milestones.
• ▸Built a scalable web application with an integrated backend and structured database.
• ▸Delivered the production u3core contract.