Alpaca
I was the first engineer hired at AlpacaML
, an art tool
for artists
. Alpaca began as a Photoshop plugin
based on Stable Diffusion and became a webapp where artists could generate
, inpaint
, and sketch
with custom ControlNets, and create their own models. We scaled from 5k to 170k users. I owned the entire model training flow
, a Dreambooth fine-tuning pipeline for both SD 1.5 and SDXL, plus the frontend to match, and a tournament system for choosing the best checkpoint
. I also designed our Postgres database
and managed the migration from DynamoDB. I worked heavily on the inference processors
and regularly took research techniques like concept sliders
, zero terminal SNR, and early stopping, into production
. I also worked on the Photoshop plugin, Stripe billing, analytics, and storage auto-cleanup. Alpaca was acquired by Captions (now Mirage) in November 2024.
