Portrait of Jorge Vicente Cantero

My name is Jorge. On the web, I usually go by jvican.

These days, I am taking a sabbatical after nearly six years at Netflix. I am using the time to play with computers, follow my curiosity, and figure out what I want the next chapter of my work to be about.

At the moment, that means taking the modern LLM stack apart and putting it back together: tokenizers, training loops, distributed training, inference systems, and GPU kernels. I am implementing pieces from first principles and working my way through PyTorch, JAX, Triton, CUDA, NCCL, and the layers below them.

I am interested not only in making models run and train at scale, but in understanding the nitty-gritty of why they run the way they do: how compiler abstractions map onto low-level hardware, where performance bottlenecks exist, and how to build ML infrastructure that helps researchers and engineers move quickly without giving up correctness and acceleration. That last question has been a recurring theme throughout my career, from compilers and build systems to ML research infrastructure.

This involves a bit of soul-searching, and deep technical study. The technical direction has by now become clear; what I am still exploring is where to apply it... which domains and problems are important enough to deserve the next several years of work. I am using this time to understand where my background and knowledge can be most useful, and take some risks.

Before this, I built ML infrastructure and research tools at Netflix, working extensively in Python across notebook infrastructure and large-scale ML systems, including a real-time feature platform used across personalization. Earlier, I worked at the Scala Center on the Scala programming language, compilers, and developer tooling.

Most of the public work below predates this current chapter. It comes from a time when I worked more openly on Scala tooling, but it still reflects the problems I enjoy: compilers, build systems, performance, and tools that help other people do better work.

Blog

I'm gradually reworking this site into a place to share notes, experiments, and occasional write-ups from the projects I've been exploring over the past few months.

Selected Projects

These are OSS projects I've significantly contributed to and/or co-founded:

Selected Posts

These are mostly old posts from the time I was doing more developer tooling in the open.

Selected Talks

iA few talks from my build-tooling years.