Tom Nguyen — AI engineer, Vietnam
Hi, I'm Tom.I ship AI products where the model never decides.
I build and run AI products end to end at NYX, my one-person studio. Five are live in production this year — and in every one, the model is never allowed to guess.
Runner-Up
AABW 2026 · Retail track (GenAI Fund)
5
products live in 2026
48
pages swept · 0 false positives (Guardian)
74
real menu items re-priced by code (Wingman)
01 /Selected work
Five products, one rule: the decision that matters is deterministic.
01 / CHESS PLATFORM · SOLO · LIVE
Chessova
Tournament broadcast, dual-engine analysis, a 25,000-puzzle bank, spaced-repetition openings, and a clip studio that cuts any game into a 9:16 short. Built and run by one person, with a paid Pro tier.
Every evaluation comes from a chess engine racing another chess engine — never a model opinion.
1,400+ passing tests · live · paid Pro tier
02 / COMPLIANCE ENGINE · AWARD-WINNING
Guardian
Reads a supplier's messy dossier and blocks non-compliant cosmetic listings against real Vietnamese law — 9 policy clauses citing actual circulars, an 80-row recall watchlist, a banned-ingredient screen.
Exactly one LLM call per document — extraction only. Verdicts never come from the LLM.
Runner-Up, Retail track — AABW 2026 · 48 live pages swept, 0 false positives
03 / ORDERING AGENT · BILINGUAL
Wingman
Order the 74-item KFC Vietnam menu entirely inside a chat, in Vietnamese or English. Upsell is computed by a pure module, not prompted — the LLM only phrases the sentence.
The agent builds the cart, but checkout re-prices every line server-side — a compromised client can't skim a single cent.
74 real menu items · every line re-priced server-side
04 / GATED PUBLISHER · SAFETY-FIRST
Nyx Persona
GPT-5.6 drafts replies for a real Threads business account. Untrusted social text lives in a wording-only zone — the demo ships with a prompt-injection attempt the system escalates instead of obeying.
Publish requires a human approving the exact bytes, bound by sha256 — approve text A, and text B can never ship.
480 unit tests · approval bound to the exact bytes
05 / RETAIL SALES AGENT · INHERITED CODEBASE
Randy
A teammate's hackathon build, taken over and re-architected into a consultative sales agent over an 11,865-SKU electronics catalog — PC builds, comparison tables and cross-sell, bilingual throughout. Six adversarial stress rounds took it from 44 tests to 327.
Search, comparison and PC builds are all decided by server code — the model writes the sentence, it never picks the SKU or the price.
327 passing tests (from 44) · 6 stress rounds · 400+ live bilingual turns
Also shipped
02 /Experience
Before the products, there was research.
2026 – Present
Founder & Engineer
NYX Studio — Vietnam
Built and run chessova.com, a live chess platform with tournament broadcast, dual-engine analysis, a 25,000-puzzle bank, a Remotion-based clip studio, and a paid Pro tier; 1,400+ passing tests.
Built Guardian, a compliance console that blocks non-compliant product listings against real law with a deterministic verdict engine — Runner-Up, Retail track, Agentic AI Build Week 2026 by GenAI Fund; swept 48 live product pages with zero false positives.
Built Wingman, a chat-commerce agent for the KFC Vietnam menu with deterministic, server-side pricing on every order; 65 tests.
Built Nyx Persona, a human-gated AI social publisher — approvals are cryptographically bound to the exact published bytes via sha256; 480 tests.
Took over a teammate's hackathon build and re-architected it into Randy, a bilingual retail sales agent over an 11,865-SKU catalog — search, comparison and PC builds decided by server code, hardened across six adversarial stress rounds; tests 44 → 327.
Delivered a bilingual corporate site for V.Star, a Vietnamese industrial group (327-web.vercel.app).
Aug 2023 – Jan 2025
Undergraduate Researcher
Deep HE Project — University of Medicine and Pharmacy at Ho Chi Minh City — Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Built a CNN-based diagnostic tool for malignant lymphoma on H&E-stained histology images.
Improved model diagnostic performance by at least 20% over the prior baseline.
Ran HoVer-Net nuclei segmentation inside the QuPath imaging platform.
Feb – Aug 2024
AI Engineer Intern
Vietsol Limited — ADAS team — Remote, Vietnam
Built machine-learning models for adaptive cruise control, object detection, and distance estimation, using Python, TensorFlow, and PyTorch.
Deployed a YOLO-based face-recognition model to micro devices, reaching 0.5-second inference time.
Tested edge AI models on ARM Cortex-M7 and Jetson Nano hardware, cutting false positives by 15%.
Aug – Nov 2023
AI Engineer Intern
FPT Software — QAI — Hanoi, Vietnam
Built a receipt and invoice OCR pipeline with PaddleOCR, improving extraction accuracy by 40%.
Extended the pipeline to handle Vietnamese-language documents.
Built weapon-recognition vision models from 15,000 labeled frames drawn from 100+ hours of footage, running a custom YOLO model at 40 FPS.
Sept 2021 – Dec 2025
BSc, General Science
University of Waterloo — Waterloo, ON, Canada
03 /Contact
Got something worth shipping? Let's talk.
Hiring an engineer who owns things end to end, or need software built for your business — either way, one message is enough.
