Robert Gardiner

Software Engineer · Scientific Computing

I like learning how systems work. I enjoy a range of topics spanning stochastic physical models and applied maths to distributed software, financial data, infrastructure, electronic structure, AI harnesses and ML.

Links: Email GitHub LinkedIn

About

I am a software engineer with a First-Class (Hons) MSci in Physics and Chemistry from Durham University. My work sits across product engineering, data infrastructure, AI systems, and platform engineering, while my academic background is in statistical mechanics, computational chemistry, and scientific simulation.

I enjoy crossing boundaries between fields. That might mean building an AI agent harness, deep diving into GenServers to better understand concurrency and supervision, self-hosting services to learn infrastructure intuition, or analysing financial data to connect statistical behaviour with the economic process underneath it.

I am especially interested in problems where mathematical models and production engineering meet

Experience

2025 - Present

Platform & AI Engineer, LiveFlow

  • Build AI systems, internal tooling, data pipelines, product features, and platform infrastructure for a financial software company.
  • Worked across multi-agent orchestration, MCP, BigQuery/Dataform pipelines, financial data systems, Next.js, Elixir, AWS, and Terraform.
  • Own production work end-to-end, including architecture, deployment, monitoring, security, incidents, and developer tooling.

2024 - 2025

Research Project, Durham University / Procter & Gamble

  • Built a multiscale polymer-surface simulation workflow spanning DFT, molecular dynamics, and dissipative particle dynamics.
  • Developed Python tooling for coarse-graining trajectories, parameter estimation, LAMMPS generation, and HPC execution through SLURM.
  • Used statistical modelling and simulation analysis to study polymer-protein surface interactions.

2023 - 2025

Freelance Full-Stack Developer

  • Built and deployed web applications using TypeScript, React, Node.js, noSQL, and Azure.
  • Worked on dashboards, data pipelines, authentication, APIs, and production deployment.

Education

2021 - 2025

MSci Physics & Chemistry — First Class

Durham University

Statistical physics, condensed matter, computational chemistry, quantum mechanics, mathematical methods, and electronic structure theory.

Selected Work

Ongoing

Flow Studio / AI Coding Runtime

React, Next.js, Elixir, TypeScript, LLM agents, microVMs

Building an application-generation system where AI agents can inspect code, modify applications, run builds, recover from runtime failures, and eventually operate inside isolated execution environments. Much of the work has been about designing clean boundaries between the product, agent harness, sandbox, and generated application.

Ongoing

Pulse / MCP Data Platform

Python, BigQuery, Dataform, MCP, embeddings

Built internal systems for querying and understanding company data using natural language, including an MCP interface over the warehouse, AI-readable analytical schemas, search and enrichment pipelines, and evaluation tooling for agent behaviour.

2026

Chronicle & Homelab

Elixir, Phoenix, PostgreSQL, Docker, Caddy, Proxmox, Tailscale, OpenTofu

A self-hosted environment I use to learn infrastructure by building it: private networking, reverse proxies, service isolation, encrypted secrets, databases, backups, deployment hooks, and applications including my personal finance system.

2024 - 2025

Multiscale Molecular Simulation

Python, Quantum ESPRESSO, AMBER, LAMMPS, HPC

Built a multiscale polymer simulation framework spanning electronic structure calculations, atomistic molecular dynamics, stochastic coarse-grained models, automated parameterisation, and HPC execution.

Small technical experiments

ESP32, C, maths, statistics, financial modelling

Small projects used as an excuse to learn: PWM and GPIO on ESP32 boards, stochastic models, linear algebra, financial time series, distributed systems, and whatever else I am trying to understand that week.

Interests

Stochastic processes / statistical mechanics / scientific machine learning / geometric deep learning / distributed systems / concurrency / AI agents / data engineering / financial modelling / embedded systems

Skills

Elixir / Python / PostgreSQL / SQL / TypeScript / React / Next.js / BigQuery / Dataform / Docker / AWS / GCP / Terraform / MCP / LLM orchestration / scientific computing / HPC