Hi, I'm Tyler Flar.
At UC San Diego I'm working on autonomous navigation for a robotic endoscope in the Advanced Robotics and Controls Lab. In summer 2026 I was a technical product manager intern at Brightree, where I built a docs-as-code pipeline for its API guides and analyzed 553M production API requests. In 2025 I interned at Leidos, where I led a DOJ program's monitoring overhaul and got a return offer, and in 2023 I interned at Cubic. Given a task or a pointer to where things live, I take it from there. Before the lab I led drone wildlife-tracking projects at Engineers for Exploration. On the side I run Lycanworks, a one-person studio that sells avatar bases for VRChat, and maintain Jackdaw, an open-source Balatro simulator for reinforcement learning, and its hosted leaderboard. I finish my CS master's at UC San Diego in March 2027.
Outside of work
- Gym
- Climbing
- 3D modeling
- Cooking
- Trying new restaurants
- Festivals
- Dogs
- Reading
Education
M.S. in Computer Science
UC San Diego
Relevant coursework: Machine Learning for Music · Advanced Computer Vision · Statistical Natural Language Processing · Algorithm Design and Analysis · Parallel Computation
B.S. in Computer Science
UC San Diego
GPA: 3.8
Skills
Languages
- Python
- JavaScript/TypeScript
- C/C++
- Rust
- SQL
- Bash
- HTML/CSS
- PowerShell
- C#
Systems & Tools
- Git
- pytest
- Playwright
- Linux
- OpenMP
- Pandoc/Typst
- CUDA
- MPI
Cloud & DevOps
- GitHub Actions
- AWS (Lambda, EventBridge, CloudWatch)
- Terraform
- Docker
- OpenTelemetry
Web
- React
- Node.js
- FastAPI
- OAuth/OIDC
- Eleventy
- Bootstrap
- Vite/Vitest
- Astro
LLM Agents
- MCP servers
- RAG (Qdrant, LangChain, FAISS)
- Claude Code
- LangGraph
- Codex
Machine Learning
- PyTorch
- NumPy
- matplotlib
- Hugging Face Transformers
- Jupyter
- scikit-learn
- pandas
- XGBoost
Robotics
- Unity
- OpenCV
- Gymnasium
- ROS
- BLE angle-of-arrival
Databases
- SQLAlchemy
- SQLite
- Neo4j
- SQL Server
- PostgreSQL
Experience
Student Researcher
AquaMesh
La Jolla, CA · Hybrid
- Helping AquaMesh get AquaSpectra, an in-water optical sensor first built for Scripps Institution of Oceanography, ready for research use by working on its software, calibration and tuning.
Student Researcher
UC San Diego Advanced Robotics and Controls Lab
La Jolla, CA · Hybrid
- Working on autonomous navigation for a robotic endoscope inside the kidney, using a graph of the kidney from the pre-op CT and depth from the camera to decide where to go next.
Projects:Endoscopic Navigation
Technical Product Manager Intern
Brightree
Remote
- Built the docs-as-code pipeline for Brightree's 27 customer-facing API guides and the steps an agent follows to keep them current, then analyzed 553M production API requests to learn how customers used the API.
Project Lead
Engineers for Exploration
La Jolla, CA · Hybrid
- Led two wildlife-tracking projects, mentored student teams (5–15 students at a time, 20+ in all), and on the radio tracker gave the team its specs and took its proposals to the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.
Projects:Radio Telemetry Tracker
Chief Engineer Intern
Leidos
Remote
- Led a DOJ program's monitoring overhaul, from tool evaluation and a white paper to ServiceNow alerts, and got a return offer for the next summer.
Tutor and Teaching Assistant
UC San Diego, CSE Department
La Jolla, CA · Hybrid
- Tutored algorithms (CSE 101), theory of computation (CSE 105) and discrete math (CSE 21) for four terms, then was a TA for computer architecture (CSE 142L), with positive reviews every term.
Systems Engineering Intern
Cubic Transportation Systems
San Diego, CA · Hybrid
- Built a Python and DOORS DXL tool that joins requirements with TestRail results in a live traceability matrix, cutting about a month of manual checking to 30 minutes.
Publications
CHASER: Robust Human Following on a Legged Robot Using Vision and Bluetooth
2026 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM) · Genova, Italy
Contribution: the Bluetooth angle-of-arrival module, which turns BLE readings from a Silicon Labs antenna array into a heading back to the operator when the camera loses them.
Links:Paper · Project write-up
Projects
Mar 2026 – Present
Jackdaw
A copy of the game Balatro for reinforcement learning, checked move by move against the real game, and a hosted leaderboard for the agents trained on it.
Sep 2025 – Present
Lycanworks
My one-person studio that sells avatar bases for VRChat, with my own release tooling and storefront.
Mar 2026 – Oct 2026
Tasque
A self-hosted platform that ran AI agents as scheduled jobs, which I built by directing coding agents to find out what they can and can't build.
Apr 2026 – Jun 2026
Active Perception for Geolocation
An AI agent that plays GeoGuessr by choosing where to look next in live Street View.