Victor Maricato

I'm a Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Upwork, working on Uma — Upwork's mindful AI — under the Algorithms & Research team. My focus is fine-tuning small language models for function calling and search-query understanding under tight latency budgets.

Before Upwork I was a research assistant at MIT CSAIL working on protein language models, a genomics data scientist at Mendelics (where a variant prediction model I built ended up in Brazil's national newborn screening program), and a data scientist at OLX and Shell.

I formally studied Medicine before moving fully into machine learning, and I've kept medical sciences as a serious intellectual interest. That background still shapes how I think about biomedical AI, diagnostics, and useful health systems. I'm currently pursuing an MSc in Health Informatics at Karolinska Institutet to keep those two tracks talking to each other.

I build side projects: focusy.co, enhancv.me, kannel.ai, and adhd-screening.org. Around 1k users, no ads.

For the medical thread of all this — the questions I keep coming back to in biomedical AI, diagnostics, and how health systems actually work — there's a separate /med page.

Tax for reading this far: meet Maria "Toia" Aleatória (Random Mary) — my dog, chief debugging companion, and head of morale.

Reach out at maricatovictor [at] gmail.com. My CV is also available as a PDF (LaTeX source here).