About
I'm Nader Heidari — an AI engineer with over a decade of experience building large-scale platforms and leading engineering teams. I've always been more interested in code that touches the real world: systems that serve millions of people, lenses, sprinklers, speakers, and the occasional capybara tower defense.
Career
2025 — now
AI Engineer · US federal government
Bringing AI and automation into large-scale government systems.
2025 — now
Co-founder & Head of AI/ML · rAI Optics
The first AI assistant for optical design — conversational workflows, LLM orchestration, and RAG pipelines that let non-experts design optical systems in minutes.
2025 — now
Consulting & community
Principal consultant at Editorial Automation Systems — three published n8n community node packages (Streak CRM, ShipStation, PandaDoc). Automation working group leader at Kwaai AI Lab.
2014 — 2025
Senior Engineering Manager → Engineering Director · The Washington Post
Led development of Carta, the Post's email and newsletter platform — 7B+ emails a year — plus real-time ETL pipelines, serverless orchestration, and personalization systems, with a team of engineers I'm still proud of.
Off hours
I make live coding music with Strudel and build Rust tooling around it, ship browser games with Bevy, and tinker with 3D printing, pottery, and home automation — my gateway to AI was asking Claude how to wire an ESP32 to run my sprinklers.