Ian Bigford

About

I’m Ian Bigford—an ML engineer, AI researcher and AI agent developer. I build products people love to use and I care deeply about making advanced AI feel simple, fast, and trustworthy. I currently work at Geotab building an internal agentic platform to improve organizational productivity and enable product teams to ship agents into their experiences.

Mission

My path into computer science and AI began with philosophy—formal logic, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. Software is where carefully structured logic meets messy real‑world problems and creates value. Generative AI introduced scalable inductive reasoning into that world, and I’m fascinated by how it changes how we conceive, build, and evaluate software.

Quick facts

  • Education: BA Philosophy (University of Guelph); MBA (Wilfrid Laurier University); MSc Computer Science (Georgia Tech)
  • Experience: 8+ years
  • Specialties: Web & Mobile Development, Computer Vision, Transformers, Agentic frameworks (LangGraph, ADK), API design
  • Location: Canada; open to US roles (TN‑1, no sponsorship required)

Expertise & focus areas

  • Agentic systems: multi‑agent orchestration, tool‑use and planning, evaluation loops, and safe deployment in production.
  • Deep learning: modern transformer workflows, fine‑tuning and prompting strategies, data curation, and evaluation.
  • Computer vision: perception pipelines, image/video understanding, and robust inference for real‑world inputs.

Can Also Do:

  • Web development: Next.js, TypeScript, accessible interfaces, real‑time UX, and performance‑minded design.
  • Mobile development: React Native, thoughtful release pipelines, and responsive interaction design.
  • API development: FastAPI in Python, streaming (SSE), clean contracts, and observability.
  • Cloud: GCP/AWS for storage, queues, and deployment.

Flagship: AI SPY

Role: CTO & Co‑founder.An AI Speech Detection Platform & Mobile App featured on CBS News nationally with over 10k users. See the website, the web client, and the mobile client.

Approach

  • Started with classic CNN baselines; evolved toward modern transformer‑based vision and stronger data/evaluation pipelines.
  • Built agentic perception/control loops and a clean feedback system to close the gap between user experience and model behavior.

Impact

  • Raised a successful seed round at a $5M valuation.
  • Secured a contract with a top global news organization for speech detection services.
  • Reached 2,000 monthly active users on the mobile app.
  • Launched the free‑to‑use web version; 500 users in week one with no marketing.

Selected work

  • Agentic AI Knowledge Base Platform — Next.js + FastAPI + multi‑agent orchestration with streaming responses and intelligent knowledge synthesis. See the project.
  • ScriptureChat (iOS) — a retrieval‑backed companion that emphasizes clarity and citations. See the project.
  • Flourish (iOS) — therapy companion built with a reliability‑first posture. See the project.

How I work

  • Product first: start from the user problem and ship the smallest valuable thing quickly.
  • Small, fast loops: tight iteration cycles across data, models, and UX with instrumentation and evals.
  • Reliability by design: clear contracts, streaming where it matters, observability, and graceful failure modes.
  • Collaborative: clear docs, principled trade‑offs, and maintainable systems.

Research & writing

I’m beginning to publish practical notes on agentic systems and applied AI. Stay tuned and check the blog for new posts.

Stack & tools

  • Frontend: Next.js (App Router), React, TypeScript, Tailwind, Framer Motion
  • Mobile: React Native
  • Backend: FastAPI (Python), SQLite/aiosqlite, server‑sent events
  • Orchestration: LangGraph, ADK, MCP; integrations with external data sources
  • ML/Data: PyTorch, NumPy, Pandas
  • Cloud: GCP/AWS

Ethics & responsible AI

I focus on transparent evaluation, user‑centered design, and safe defaults. In AI SPY, we couple perception models with clear feedback loops and guardrails so the system remains useful, reliable, and respectful of users.

What’s next

I’m not consulting. I’m exploring roles at top engineering organizations where I can build applied AI systems—agent platforms, perception, and real‑time products—at scale.

Contact & links