Chukwuemeka Okafor
LLM Engineer, Fine-Tuning & Distillation
Lagos, Nigeria · UTC+1 · 2 years of experience
Chukwuemeka focuses on measurable model behavior, reliable retrieval, and production evaluation.
Request a shortlistWhy this profile fits
Evaluation before optimization
Defines datasets, graders, and regression checks so model changes are measured against real failure cases.
Reliable retrieval and tool use
Improves grounding, structured outputs, tool permissions, and recovery behavior for production workflows.
Cost and latency control
Treats task success, response time, and model spend as one production system rather than separate concerns.
Relevant toolkit
Python
LangGraph
Claude API
OpenAI GPT API
PostgreSQLDelivery evidence
Selected work
TriageDistill, Support Ticket Classifier
Fintech scale-upReplaced a costly frontier-model call in the support pipeline with a distilled, fine-tuned Llama 3 8B trained on synthetic data labeled by the larger teacher model. Delivered a 71% cut in cost per ticket and sub-800ms p95 latency while staying within two accuracy points of the teacher on a held-out eval set.
GroundTruth RAG Eval Harness
B2B legal-tech SaaSBuilt a retrieval pipeline over pgvector with reranking and a Braintrust regression suite that scored groundedness and citation accuracy on every change. Diagnosed a chunking bug that was causing confident, wrong answers and lifted answer groundedness from 74% to 91% on the team's eval set.
Relevant experience
Career timeline
LLM Engineer (Junior)
2024–PresentDevlyn (Client Engagements) · Remote, Lagos, Nigeria
- Distilled frontier-model behavior into fine-tuned open-weight 7B to 8B models with QLoRA, cutting inference cost per successful task by 60 to 71% across three client engagements.
Associate Machine Learning Engineer
2023–2024Series-A Fintech Startup · Lagos, Nigeria
- Fine-tuned transformer classifiers for transaction categorization, raising macro F1 from 0.82 to 0.91 on the internal benchmark.
Machine Learning Intern
2023–2023AI Software Consultancy · Lagos, Nigeria
- Prototyped retrieval-augmented chatbots over client documents using pgvector and sentence-transformers, presented to stakeholders as working demos.
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Skill depth
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Relevant experience by skill
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Languages
Frameworks
Libraries/APIs
Tools
Paradigms
Platforms
Storage
Education
Formal background
B.Sc., Computer Science
University of Lagos · 2019–2023 · Second Class Upper Division (2:1)
Credentials
Certifications
AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate
Amazon Web Services · 2022 · Certified
Databricks Certified Generative AI Engineer Associate
Databricks · 2025 · Certified
Communication
Languages
English
Native
Igbo
Native
French
Conversational
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