Charlie Linville
Founder & Builder — AI & Quantitative Systems
Right now I'm building AI systems and the businesses around them — an AI consulting firm with clients in mortgage and healthcare, an app publisher shipping location-aware assistants, and software that runs a coffee roastery end to end. Co-founded a fintech startup before that and shipped its trading platform in 14 weeks. When I'm not shipping, I'm usually reading, roasting coffee, or watching F1.
Journey
Co-Founder at Updraft Consulting
AI consulting firm with paying clients in mortgage and healthcare staffing. Architected seven AI workflows for a mortgage brokerage, from contract date extraction to refinance targeting, and built a GLBA-aligned data-handling framework classifying client data by sensitivity and approved processing environments. Co-lead sales — scoping and pitching engagements to presidents and review committees at firms up to $1B in revenue.
Founder at Guleki
App publishing company focused on AI-native mobile experiences. Our first product, Geolocate Me, gives AI assistants real-time location context through a private GPS tracker with MCP integration — live on iOS and Android.
Co-Founder & Technical Lead at Agori
Early-stage fintech startup. Architected and shipped a real-time quantitative paper trading platform in 14 weeks using AI-native development workflows, then deployed it for a trading competition run with Old Mission Capital at the University of Michigan. Owned AWS infrastructure, security, developer tooling, and GitHub CI/CD. Recruited 4 team members and managed 3 reports while leading product strategy and supporting an angel raise.
Technology Consultant — SC Sports
Built the auction pricing system behind two live deployments, converting each lot into a max-bid recommendation against an ROI target. Encoded buyer's fees and bid multipliers for 18 auction houses so recommendations reflected true landed cost.
Wisconsin Quantum Computing Club
Participating in seminars on quantum computing and quantum information. Competed in the 2024 IBM Fall Fest hackathon.
Member At-Large — UW-Madison Vice Chancellor Study Group
Selected through the Associated Students of Madison (ASM) Shared Governance process to represent the student body. Advised the Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration and senior leaders monthly on food security, budget model changes, and renewable energy initiatives.
Technology Consultant — Backpack Society
Architected and pitched a systems overhaul for a nonprofit serving 70+ schools with kids in unstable food situations, winning funding from the leadership team. Designed and built the organization's new website on AWS, then advised the board on technology selection, implementation tradeoffs, and budget requests.
Cyberpatriots — Cisco Lead
Competed in a national cybersecurity competition run by the Air Force Association. Led Cisco networking for my school team and trained 2+ members each year. Hardened Ubuntu 22, Fedora 36, Windows 10, and Windows Server 2019 systems for competition.
Education
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Sep 2024 — May 2028BS in Applied Mathematics, Engineering & Physics (AMEP). Coursework spanning Modern Physics, Numerical Linear Algebra, Mathematical Computing, and Philosophy of AI.
University of New South Wales — Study Abroad
Jan — May 2026Semester abroad at UNSW Kensington in Sydney, Australia. Coursework in Numerical Linear Algebra, Philosophy of AI, and Mathematical Computing.
Projects
Dragonfly
2026Built an autonomous security testing engine with model-agnostic execution-time safeguards. Wraps 114 security testing tools behind a composable policy pipeline with scope enforcement, action gating, and kill switches. Provides adapters for MCP, CLI, and LangChain/LangGraph. Ran a scripted ablation study (45 runs) and an LLM behavioral study (60 runs) to evaluate safeguard effectiveness. Includes 1,259 tests and a Docker test range.
Sizzle Roasting Software
2026 — PresentBuilt a platform that runs a coffee roastery end to end: bean inventory and costs, live machine control, and AI roast coaching. Designed closed-loop software that automatically steers the roaster to hit a target temperature curve, validated against a physics simulator. Trained a model to predict how a batch will taste from its roast data, then search for the profile with the best predicted flavor. Built a system that hears the beans crack through a microphone and retrains itself on that machine's own audio. A 47-tool agent on Strands and LangChain runs local models on an NVIDIA Jetson to keep coaching under 8 seconds.
AI Powered Auction Arbitrage Agent
2025Designed and deployed a system that prices auction lots and converts each into a max-bid recommendation against an ROI target — 2,800 lots across two live deployments. A Python pipeline ingests listings and resolves market comps through a three-source confidence-weighted lookup, with entity matching on unstructured lot titles handled by GPU-accelerated OCR and an embedding engine. Encodes buyer's fees and bid multipliers for 18 auction houses, and persists results in AWS (DynamoDB, S3) for backtesting and future model training.
Agent Academy
2025Built an automated evolution system that improves Claude Code agents using genetic algorithms. Treats agent prompts as a population of candidates, tests them against programming benchmarks, scores them with a multi-persona jury of specialized evaluators, and breeds the next generation through crossover and mutation. Runs unattended overnight with checkpoint/resume support.
Covered-Call Optimization Engine
2025Built a covered-call optimization engine that streams live options/price data from Interactive Brokers (IBKR) and recommends strike/expiration and position sizing under capital constraints. Implemented a Monte Carlo risk model to evaluate thousands of scenarios and compute expected P&L, win rate, and Value-at-Risk.
Rydberg Blockade Gate Simulation & Pulse Optimization
2025Simulated neutral-atom qubits in QuTiP: built time-dependent Hamiltonians for ground-to-Rydberg drives with detuning, modeled open-system dynamics via Lindblad operators. Designed and optimized Gaussian control pulses with SciPy to realize single- and two-qubit gates. Produced reproducible Jupyter analyses with parameter sweeps and clear plots of Rabi oscillations, coherence, and state populations.
Also Built
Tennis Alpha Finder
Quantitative in-play tennis betting system exploiting systematic mispricing on Kalshi. Markov chain model trained on 10,972 matches. 85.5% win rate across 152 paper trades.
Auto-Influencer
Multi-account X content automation platform. Ingests 650+ RSS feeds, generates persona-tailored posts with Claude, and schedules natively through the X API.
Idea Generation Engine
AI-powered market opportunity discovery engine processing 650+ RSS feeds. Clusters by similarity with TF-IDF and DBSCAN, surfaces opportunities via local 20B-parameter LLM.
Quantum Error Correction
Neural network for detecting local and non-local errors in quantum computers. Trained on 1M+ simulation runs, achieving 95%+ detection in a 12-qubit system.
Skills & Certifications
Languages
Technologies
Skills
Certifications & Workshops
Misc
- ☕ Coffee roasting — building the software I wanted for my own roaster
- ⚛ Quantum computing — from Qiskit summer schools to Rydberg simulations
- 🤖 AI systems — building agents, RAG, memory systems, running local models, prompt engineering
- 🏁 F1 racing — the intersection of engineering and competition
- 💪 Longevity training — optimizing for the long game
Writing
I write about AI systems, quantitative modelling, and what I learn shipping them. Read the latest posts or subscribe on Substack.