Leonardo Aoun

Fractional AI Lead | Ex-Meta Research Engineer

High-impact technical leader with a background in Applied AI (Meta) and early-stage R&D (CTO, ML Lead). Scaling engineering organisations, bridging technical roadmaps with business strategy, and mentoring high-performing teams — fractional leadership for data-intensive AI startups.

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About

High-impact technical leader with a background in Applied AI (Meta) and early-stage R&D as CTO and ML Lead. I specialise in scaling engineering organisations, bridging technical roadmaps with business strategy, and mentoring high-performing teams. Through Travelling Codesman I offer fractional leadership for data-intensive AI startups — cloud or on-prem — with the judgement to move research into systems that survive production.

Experience

Freelance / Contracting
2025 – present
2025 – present
Work experience
Travelling Codesman Ltd
2025 – present
Website
1. Freelance / Contracting
  2025 – present
  - Fractional leadership
  - Applied AI
  - R&D scaling
London & remote
Fractional and contracting work with startups and SMEs that need R&D teams to scale without losing delivery discipline — including agentic systems and production AI.
ML Lead
2024 – 2025
2024 – 2025
Work experience
Noah Labs
2024 – 2025
Website
1. ML Lead
  2024 – 2025
  - Acoustic AI
  - Mentoring
  - CI/CD
Remote — Berlin
Led ML at Noah Labs (Berlin-based; I worked remote) through the jump from research prototypes to systems that had to hold up in healthcare — process, mentoring, and acoustic AI in production.
CTO & Co-founder
2023 – 2024
2023 – 2024
Work experience
Laces AI
2023 – 2024
Website
1. CTO & Co-founder
  2023 – 2024
  - AWS
  - Next.js
  - Computer vision
  - Sales
London
Co-founded Laces AI and owned more than the technical platform. On the product side I architected cloud-native infrastructure on AWS and a Next.js web app delivering real-time computer-vision insights from models such as YOLO and StrongSORT.

I was equally deep in sales and discovery: reaching out to clubs and coaches, learning their pain points, and turning those conversations into a sharper value proposition for video analysts and sporting directors. We also built agentic systems — before that language was everywhere — to automate parts of the sales and cold-outreach process so the team could spend time on the conversations that mattered.
Machine Learning Engineer
2020 – 2023
2020 – 2023
Work experience
Meta AI Applied Research
2020 – 2023
Website
1. Machine Learning Engineer
  2020 – 2023
  - Egocentric video
  - Computer vision
  - PyTorch Lightning
London
Three years on Meta AI Applied Research in London, on the Behavioural Computing team. The brief was anything human-centred that shows up in egocentric video — in our case, from the wearer’s point of view on the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses programme.

A large thread was automatic avatar generation and animation that stays true to the person: expressions and emotion cues vary across cultures, so a one-size-fits-all detector tends to misread people. We worked toward avatars and motion that respect how someone actually presents, rather than flattening everyone onto a single cultural template.

Alongside that, the engineering work was the usual applied-research grind at scale — data pipelines over hundreds of thousands of video hours with PyTorch Lightning and internal distributed systems, cheaper inference and training (~70% compute reduction) without giving up accuracy, and getting research models into production-ready cloud infrastructure.
Applied Science Intern
Summer 2019
Summer 2019
Work experience
Amazon
Summer 2019
Website
1. Applied Science Intern
  Summer 2019
  - PyTorch3D
  - 3D retrieval
Berlin
Applied science internship with Amazon’s computer vision team in Berlin. I worked with PyTorch3D on a retrieval system that matched catalogue items by 3D shape — so similar geometry could surface even when texture or photos differed.
Software Engineering Intern
2018 – 2019
Winter 2019
Software Engineering Intern
Summer 2018
Work experience
Facebook
2018 – 2019
Website
1. Software Engineering Intern
  Winter 2019
  - Internal tools
  - Research collaboration
2. Software Engineering Intern
  Summer 2018
  - Data privacy
  - Security
London · New York
Summer 2018 — London. Data privacy and security. I worked on systems that make sure user data is deleted when it should be — the kind of enforcement that only matters if it is reliable at scale. Related public write-up: Enforcing data deletion at Facebook scale (DELF).

Winter 2019 — Facebook AI Research, Manhattan. I built toward an internal research-project discovery tool: a way for researchers and engineers to find relevant projects and collaborate across the organisation.
Research Engineering Intern
Summer 2017
Summer 2017
Work experience
Adobe
Summer 2017
Website
1. Research Engineering Intern
  Summer 2017
  - GPU clusters
  - Distributed training
San Jose
Research engineering internship with Adobe Research in San Jose. The work sat horizontally across the research organisation rather than inside one product team: standing up a GPU training cluster and benchmarking multi-node training options so labs across Adobe Research could train at scale.

Testimonials

Wilhelm, CTO · Terraspect
Leonardo was a key partner during our rapid MVP iterations, ultimately building the stable task orchestration and agentic infrastructure we needed to move into production with confidence.
Science Machine
Leonardo implemented a context optimisation strategy for our long-form agent discussions, unlocking significantly longer conversational coherence while maintaining high token efficiency.
Polaron
Leonardo delivered enterprise-grade features and task orchestration for our workflows, including automated GPU provisioning and self-hosted infrastructure for our on-premise end-customers.

Let's talk

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About

Experience

Travelling Codesman LtdOpen details

Freelance / Contracting

Noah LabsOpen details

ML Lead

Laces AIOpen details

CTO & Co-founder

Meta AI Applied ResearchOpen details

Machine Learning Engineer

AmazonOpen details

Applied Science Intern

FacebookOpen details

Software Engineering Intern

Software Engineering Intern

AdobeOpen details

Research Engineering Intern

Testimonials

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