Rephael Berkooz
Rephael Berkooz
About MeResume
Employment History

Independent Contractor

Self-Employed

May 2025 - Present

Independent software engineer, specialized in AI agentic systems and machine learning

  • Implementing agentic systems, including real-time data processing and graph-based models

  • Developing integrated data flows and information processing systems, providing real-time feedback and productivity from AI agents

  • Industries: SaaS for sales, SaaS for business process management

Software Engineer

Podium

August 2024 - April 2025

Cloud platform for AI customer communication. Backed by YCombinator, Google Ventures, Accel, IVP

  • Engineering agent AI messaging systems, achieving 2x/second live communication with human customers

  • Translated cutting-edge research papers (HumanEval, Tau Bench) into novel custom evaluation tools that benchmarked and guided safe AI Agent development

  • Created hallucination detection and mitigation tools, resulting in 98% reduction in error cases (~50 daily errors => 1)

  • Architected and lead development of human-in-the-loop AI information system: teaching AI agents to recognize gaps in information, reach out for help, and enabling Podium customers to guide and steer AI behaviors during uncertainty

  • Created DevOps infrastructure for event-driven message systems, communicating between local and deployed Kafka and Kubernetes, reducing deployment time by over 90%

  • Technologies: LangChain, LangGraph, FastAPI, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes, Gitlab, Elasticsearch, SQL (Postgres, pgVector), Python

Software Engineer, Data Scientist

Tulip Interfaces

June 2021 - August 2024

Series C startup from MIT - an IoT and cloud platform for manufacturing data and operations. Backed by E14 Fund, Vertex Ventures, DMG MORI, Insight Partners, TIME Ventures

  • Created statistical control toolkit for cloud analytics (fullstack), viewed 600+ times per day in factory operations

  • Developed query language tools for manufacturing customers to query and visualize data

  • Expanded ETL data pipelines for internal analytics to process 11M+ records daily

  • Deployed ML microservice for forecasting and anomaly detection

  • Architected and engineered RESTful HTTP microservice for managing NoSQL database

  • Technologies: MLFlow, MLServer, Scikit-Learn, Prophet/NeuralProphet, ONNX, Airflow, AWS Redshift, Typescript (Node.js, React), MongoDB, Go, RabbitMQ


Education

The College of Wooster

August 2017 - May 2021

B.A. Mathematics - Cum Laude, Minor in Computer Science

  • Mathematics GPA: 3.8, Graduated with departmental honors

  • Member of Pi Mu Epsilon Mathematics Honor Society

  • Programming Coursework: Machine Learning, Operating Systems, Database Engineering, Data Structures & Algorithms

  • Mathematics Coursework: Regression Analysis, Operations Research, Combinatorics & Graph Theory, Probability, Real Analysis, Algebra


Projects

Music Recommendation with Wavelet Analysis

Mathematics Thesis

Novel recommendation algorithm for music based on cognitive perception

  • Developed feature extraction methodology with signal processing and wavelet analysis

  • Implemented basic signal processing library with Python/Numpy (filtering, convolutions, wavelet transforms)

Methods for Hearing Augmentation

MIT Media Lab Collaboration

Research collaboration developing accessibility device for augmenting human hearing

  • Creating neural network architecture for understanding localization capacity of different sound signals

  • Developing novel signal transformation methods to quantify and characterize human sound perception

  • Utilized symbolic regression to translate engineered features into models