Justin Gutierrez

About Me

Hey there! I'm a 20-year-old student at San Jose State University studying Computer Science and progressing toward a career in Software Engineering. I've dived into a plethora of projects and roles, including machine learning, RAG, backend development, and AI/LLM evaluations. Ultimately, I hope to create or work on a product that makes a real difference for those in need. Check out some of my past experiences and projects below.

When I'm not building apps or grinding LeetCode, you can find me out in nature. "Touching grass" is one of my favorite activities—whether that means a beautiful hike through Yosemite or an intense night of pickleball, I'm always looking for opportunities to have fun and explore new places. You can also catch me at the movie theater or more recently reading new books. I firmly believe that great stories and modern cinema hold valuable life lessons that broaden our everyday perspectives and bring peace of mind. If you're curious, I've included a few of my favorite books, past and future hikes, and movies I've enjoyed below!

Experiences

Professional Experience

AI Trainer

Jul. 2026 – Present

Handshake · Remote

Evaluated multimodal AI tasks and wrote precise prompts and rubrics to produce reliable training data, surfacing temporal reasoning, grounding, and hallucination failures.

AI Engineer

Jul. 2026 – Present

DataAnnotation · Remote

Audited AI-generated code and agent workflows, then ran adversarial evaluations—including a MySQL incident simulation and sycophancy grading that drove a model score to 62%.

Web Developer

Jul. 2025 – Aug. 2025

Freelance · Sacramento

Built a photography booking app with an admin dashboard, secure authentication, and REST APIs for scheduling and client management.

Machine Learning Researcher

Sep. 2024 – May 2025

San Jose State University · San Jose, CA

Built a Python healthcare classification pipeline and benchmarked four models to 80.52% accuracy with documented, reproducible experiments.

Leadership & Activities

College Corps Fellow

Jun. 2025 – May 2026

San Jose State University · San Jose, CA

Taught programming to 100+ K–6 students twice weekly and maintained a 450+ hour service commitment with reusable lesson documentation for future cohorts.

Projects

TunerData

Jun. 2026

A browser-based validation tool that helps car owners catch bad CSV datalogs before sending them to tuners, with rule scoring, charts, gauge replay, and reports.

Tools & Technologies: Next.js 16, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, PapaParse, Recharts, Vitest

Internship Application Tracker

May 2026

A Python CLI that turns Gmail internship emails into Excel trackers with company, role, pay, and status using local Ollama classification and incremental refresh.

Tools & Technologies: Python, Gmail API, Ollama, SQLite, Pandas, Excel

AI DocPilot

Apr. 2026

A local-first RAG document assistant with a multi-stage retrieval pipeline, citation tracking, and grounded responses backed by Ollama and Cloudflare storage.

Tools & Technologies: Cloudflare Pages Functions, D1, R2, Ollama, JavaScript

TerraScope

Jun. 2025

A crop risk platform that combines geospatial inputs, agricultural datasets, and ML-driven decision support with a FastAPI backend and Dockerized workflow.

Tools & Technologies: Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Docker, React

Hikes

Completed

Quarry Trail

Auburn

8.5/10

Distance
8.84 miles
Elevation
1,044 feet
Time
3 hours, 1 minute

Pioneer Express Trail

Folsom Lake

7.7/10

Distance
5.16 miles
Elevation
602 feet
Time
1 hour, 57 minutes

Totals

Hikes
2
Distance
14.00 miles
Elevation
1,646 feet
Time
4 hours, 58 minutes
Average rating
8.1/10

Planned

  • Mount Shasta
  • Secret Cove at Lake Tahoe
  • Half Dome
  • Mount Tamalpais
  • Point Lobos
  • Big Sur

Movies

The Odyssey

Directed by Christopher Nolan · Matt Damon

9.4/10

An amazing film by Christopher Nolan, I did miss the first 10-ish minutes of the film but no matter, I thoroughly enjoyed how powerful the story was told. One of my favorite scenes and director choices was the silencing of the audio when Odysseus crossed through the sea of sirens in which he, by sheer will, strapped himself to the ship and forced himself to go through the emotion, pain, and power of the siren songs. What was beautiful about this is the fact that the audio was muted for the audience, but the emotion from Matt Damon was so powerful and well-acted that it was like we could hear what he was going through. Definitely need to rewatch this in IMAX 70mm as it was intended.

Favorite scene

Odysseus crossing through the sea of sirens while strapped to the ship — especially the choice to mute the audio for the audience and let Matt Damon’s performance carry the pain and power of the siren songs.

The Invite

Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen

9.1/10

An incredible film that is both funny and real. A lot of useful lessons not just on relationships, but on managing your happiness are included in the film. Not to mention the amazing soundtrack and sound placements, making each emotion feel real and you know exactly what's going on not just from what you see but also what you hear. Beautiful ending as well. I LOVED the piano.

Favorite scene

The scene where Hawk explains the story behind his name, with Seth Rogen’s hilarious acting making the moment both hilarious and touching — fully immersive, emotionally and comically.

Books

Red Rising

by Pierce Brown

8.8/10

This book sends you through a spiral of character development. While it is incredibly futuristic, it holds many real world truths about capitalism, how we see each other, and class society. One might look at this book and enjoy it from a historical perspective, scientific perspective, or a sci-fi perspective, and still enjoy it to the fullest. Very excited to read the next book in the trilogy.

© 2026 Justin Gutierrez