Blake Burnley

Computer Science @ Georgia Tech

Experience

roles I've had & things I've built

Software Engineer Intern
Feb – May 2026 · AWS · Python

Nexus Enablement

AI-Powered Due Diligence Pipeline

  • Architected and deployed an end-to-end AI due diligence automation pipeline processing multi-document investment deals (PDF/DOCX) using AWS Lambda, Claude via AWS Bedrock, and Reducto-based document parsing.
  • Built parallelized extraction workflows with confidence scoring, source excerpt validation, and structured schema generation to automate investment memo creation — including financial analysis, risk assessment, and recommendation outputs.
  • Developed supporting infrastructure including reviewer permissions, audit logging, extraction correction workflows, scheduled cleanup jobs, email notifications, and PDF/DOCX export functionality across four distributed Lambda services.

Cross-Document Intelligence & Citation System

  • Engineered a semantic search and citation verification system enabling reviewers to trace AI-generated outputs back to original PDF/DOCX source documents with inline browser rendering and highlighted citations.
  • Implemented a five-stage text-matching pipeline (exact, sequential, prefix, chunk-based, and fuzzy trigram matching) to robustly locate excerpts across unstructured documents and scanned layouts.
AWS Lambda AWS Bedrock Claude AI Python Reducto Semantic Search

Projects

things I've built

ML Researcher
2025 · Python · PyTorch

Efficient Financial Forecasting via Knowledge Distillation

Distilled a 700M parameter time-series foundation model (Amazon Chronos-2) into a compact 1.2M parameter Temporal Fusion Transformer for high-frequency intraday stock forecasting. Used a hybrid pinball + MSE loss against teacher soft labels across 20 S&P 500 / Nasdaq-100 symbols. The distilled student achieved 46.89% directional accuracy — outperforming the zero-shot teacher (35%) and persistence baseline (8.32%) — while being ~580× smaller in parameter count. Research conducted for CS 4644: Deep Learning at Georgia Tech.

Python PyTorch Lightning Knowledge Distillation Temporal Fusion Transformer Time Series Chronos-2 Quantitative Finance
Full-Stack Developer
2024 · Python

Dual Meet Lineup Builder

Web-based tool that creates optimal swim meet lineups for single team and strategic dual meet scenarios. Pulls swimmer times using a headless Chrome + Selenium scraper, cleans data with pandas, then runs assignment algorithms to produce the best individual and relay line-ups. Runs in a Docker-containerized Flask API with a responsive front end.

Python Selenium Pandas Flask Docker
ML Engineer
2024 · Python

Sovereign Debt Crisis Prediction System

ML system predicting sovereign debt crises up to 3 years in advance using macroeconomic indicators from 68 countries spanning 1961–2024. Compares Random Forest (0.932 ROC-AUC), Gradient Boosting (0.911 ROC-AUC), and clustering methods. Features engineered using 5-year rolling windows over GDP growth, inflation, credit levels, and reserves.

Python scikit-learn Random Forest Gradient Boosting Feature Engineering
iOS Developer
2024 · Swift

Strain Fitness Tracker

SwiftUI wellness companion pulling workouts, sleep, HRV, stress, and nutrition from HealthKit. Layers recovery dashboards, streak tracking, and a Solo Leveling–inspired Hunter stat sheet on top of on-device CreateML recovery predictions. Core Data stores historical trends alongside guided breathing suggestions and reminders.

SwiftUI HealthKit Core ML Core Data
Full-Stack Developer
2023 · Java

WanderSync

Mobile app enabling real-time collaborative travel planning. Users create shared itineraries, manage destinations, accommodations, and dining plans with secure authentication and live synchronization for group travelers.

Java Firebase Android Agile
Game Developer
2023 · C

Fly Swatter

Fast-paced GameBoy Advance game written in C. The player swats flies within a 15-second timer, competing for a high-score leaderboard. Features name entry, sprite animation, and collision detection built directly on the GBA hardware graphics engine.

C GBA Engine Sprite Animation Collision Detection