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Available for Projects & Roles
Phnom Penh, Cambodia

HELLO! I'M

DUCH
PANHATHUN

AI / ML Engineer

I build applied machine learning and production web systems — from computer-vision models and LLM pipelines to the APIs, dashboards and payment flows around them.

01 — Published research

Fraud detection, DOI-indexed

02 — Pan-SEA AI Challenge 2025

Top 20 of 100+ ASEAN teams

03 — Core stack

Python · TypeScript · AWS

01 — About Me

ENGINEERING AT THE INTERSECTION OF MODELS & SYSTEMS

01 — Perspective

I'm a software engineer working across applied machine learning and full-stack product engineering. Most recently I was a Python Engineer at Ailsa HQ Limited, a UK AI grant-funding platform, and an IT Consultant at Save the Children Cambodia — holding both roles concurrently through 2026.

02 — Perspective

My work tends to sit where models meet real systems. On one side that means training deep-learning classifiers, engineering features for tabular models, and wiring LLM and embedding pipelines. On the other it means the unglamorous half that makes those things usable: REST APIs, access-control systems, payment integrations, admin dashboards and the deployment around them.

03 — Perspective

A lot of that work has been for Cambodia and the region — crop-disease recognition delivered to farmers through a Telegram chatbot, a point-of-sale and ERP system for a coffee business, national QR payment rails, and bilingual Khmer/English interfaces. I care about software that reaches people who aren't well served by the default assumptions of most products.

04 — Perspective

I graduated in Information Technology Engineering from the Royal University of Phnom Penh in 2025, and published my thesis research on payment-fraud detection independently.

Core Focus Disciplines

  • Computer vision & deep learning classifiers
  • Gradient-boosted tabular ML & fraud detection
  • LLM & embedding pipelines (RAG, agent proxies)
  • High-throughput backend APIs & data pipelines
  • Full-stack product engineering (Next.js, NestJS)
  • National payment rails (Bakong KHQR, ABA PayWay)

Milestones & Recognition

Independent Research

Published Thesis on Payment-Fraud Detection

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15061986

Competition

Pan-SEA AI Challenge 2025

Top 20 Finalist among 100+ ASEAN engineering teams

Regional Commitment

Building localized, accessible systems for Southeast Asia
02 — Disciplines

WHAT I DO

Specialized in applying deep learning models and engineering reliable full-stack production systems — combining intelligent models with the unglamorous backend plumbing that makes them usable.

01 / DISCIPLINE

AI & MACHINE LEARNING

Applied Deep Learning & Generative AI

Designing, training, and operationalizing computer vision models, gradient-boosted tabular classifiers, and LLM-powered reasoning pipelines built for real-world inference constraints.

Core Engineering Scope

  • Computer vision classifiers (ConvNeXt, EfficientNet) reaching up to 99.74% accuracy
  • Tabular ML & cost-sensitive fraud detection on imbalanced financial transactions
  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with vector databases and embedding search
  • LLM agent gateways with multi-key round-robin rotation and thought streaming
  • Data pipelines, automated augmentation, focal loss, and cosine LR scheduling

Applied Technologies

PyTorchTensorFlow / Kerasscikit-learnOpenCVFastAPIOpenAI & AnthropicFAISS / Vector SearchCatBoost / XGBoost
02 / DISCIPLINE

FULL-STACK & PRODUCTION SYSTEMS

Scalable Web Platforms & Cloud Architecture

Architecting end-to-end production applications, microservices, secure authentication layers, and asynchronous background pipelines from blank repositories to high-availability deployment.

Core Engineering Scope

  • High-throughput asynchronous scraping pipelines with AWS SQS and MongoDB
  • National payment rails integration (Bakong KHQR, ABA PayWay, Stripe) with idempotency
  • Transitive role-based access control (RBAC) and service-to-service authentication
  • Enterprise POS terminals, ERP engines, bilingual Khmer/English dashboards
  • Cloud deployments on AWS (EC2, ECS, Lambda, Route 53) with Docker & Terraform

Applied Technologies

Next.jsTypeScriptFastAPINestJSAWS (ECS, SQS, S3)PostgreSQLMongoDBDockerTailwind CSS
03 — Selected Work

SELECTED WORKS

Flagship machine learning deployments, enterprise web platforms, and open-source systems engineered for real-world impact.

All Works Archive
01AI & Cloud Platforms

AI Grant-Funding Platform

Ailsa HQ Limited • May 2025 – Aug 2026

A six-service platform that helps businesses discover grant funding, match against it, and manage their applications — with AI integrated throughout.

Built five funder-specific scrapers for major UK and EU funding bodies, each using a different extraction strategy: undocumented JSON API reverse-engineering, HTML parsing, hybrid headless-browser fallback, and sitemap-less crawling — with dedicated automated test coverage for each.
PythonFastAPINext.jsMongoDB+5
02Computer Vision & Deep Learning

Plant Disease Recognition

Save the Children Cambodia • Nov 2025 – Jun 2026

Deep-learning models that identify diseases in cucumber and cauliflower crops from a photo, delivered to farmers through a Telegram chatbot that also recommends treatment.

Trained and deployed deep-learning models across two crop families — ConvNeXt-Large and EfficientNet-B5 for cucumber (98.06% test accuracy, 94.82% macro-F1 across 7 classes) and EfficientNetB3 for cauliflower (99.74% test accuracy, 99.68% macro-F1 across 5 classes), each measured on a held-out test split.
PyTorchTensorFlow / KerasPythonTelegram Bot API+2
03AI & Systems

Thun Murex Gateway

Open Source • Oct 2026

A self-hosted Next.js streaming API gateway that proxies chat requests across cloud LLM providers with multi-key round-robining to eliminate rate limits, while unifying local coding CLI agents under a single standard /api/chat endpoint.

Multi-key round-robin rotation across multiple API keys per provider (SEA-LION, Cerebras, Groq) to avoid provider rate limits.
Next.jsTypeScriptTailwind CSSTailscale+2
Source
06 / ARCHIVE

WANT TO SEE MORE?

Explore the complete catalog of open-source developer tools, AI agents, 3D extensions, games, and enterprise applications.

04 — Career & Experience

MY CAREER & EXPERIENCE

A progressive track record delivering applied AI/ML pipelines and scalable web applications across international and regional organizations.

25 May 2025 – 23 Aug 2026
Core Role

Python Engineer

Ailsa HQ Limited

AI-powered grant-funding discovery and application platform (UK)

• Built the platform's production scraping tier — five funder-specific scrapers for major UK and EU funding bodies, each with a distinct extraction strategy and dedicated automated test coverage.

Python/FastAPI microservicesNext.jsNode.js/ExpressMongoDBAWS
16 Nov 2025 – Jun 2026
Core Role

IT Consultant

Save the Children Cambodia

Tracks: Plant Disease Recognition (AI/ML) • Coffee Business Management System

PyTorchTensorFlow/KerasPythonAngularNestJS
1 Feb 2024 – 1 Mar 2025
Core Role

IT Intern

Save the Children Cambodia

• Built the Remote Positive Parenting platform — a Khmer-language website and Telegram chatbot — including the admin CMS and a campaign/quiz broadcast scheduler.

ReactFirebasePythonFlaskLaravel
28 Apr – 8 May 2026
Contract / Advisory

Data Collector

Vikasa Advisory and Academy

16 – 30 Mar 2026
Contract / Advisory

Web Development Consultant

CCYMCR

Built a bilingual NGO website with a hand-built CMS spanning ~30 editable content sections.

16 – 30 Dec 2025
Contract / Advisory

Web Developer

Garden Options (Scottish Borders, UK)

Single-page marketing site in Framer with a custom React contact-form component wired to EmailJS.

28 Mar – 1 May 2025
Contract / Advisory

Freelance Data Interpretation

CWEA Project

Data interpretation and visualisation (Python, Excel).

12 Sep – 2 Oct 2023
Contract / Advisory

Freelance Data Collector

Confluences Asie Co., Ltd.

05 — Tech Stack

TECHNOLOGIES & TOOLS

A battle-tested stack spanning machine learning, high-scale web platforms, cloud infrastructure, and systems engineering.

Python icon
Python
TypeScript icon
TypeScript
JavaScript icon
JavaScript
C++ icon
C++
Bash icon
Bash
HTML5 icon
HTML5
CSS3 icon
CSS3
React icon
React
Next.js icon
Next.js
Node.js icon
Node.js
PyTorch icon
PyTorch
TensorFlow icon
TensorFlow
FastAPI icon
FastAPI
NestJS icon
NestJS
Tailwind CSS icon
Tailwind CSS
OpenCV icon
OpenCV
Laravel icon
Laravel
Angular icon
Angular
AWS icon
AWS
Docker icon
Docker
PostgreSQL icon
PostgreSQL
MongoDB icon
MongoDB
Redis icon
Redis
Firebase icon
Firebase
Git icon
Git
GitHub icon
GitHub
Linux icon
Linux
Vercel icon
Vercel
VS Code icon
VS Code
Hugging Face icon
Hugging Face
OpenAI icon
OpenAI
Figma icon
Figma
Postman icon
Postman

Languages • Computer Vision • PyTorch • Next.js • AWS Cloud

05 — Research

Published research

My undergraduate thesis, published independently and DOI-indexed.

Improving Online Payment Fraud Detection with Feature Engineering and Cost-Sensitive Machine Learning

Royal University of Phnom Penh · 8 June 2025

An end-to-end machine-learning pipeline for financial fraud detection, published independently on Zenodo under CC-BY 4.0 and indexed on ResearchGate.

Transactions analysed
6.36MTransactions analysed
ROC-AUC (CatBoost)
99.96%ROC-AUC (CatBoost)
F1-score
99.79%F1-score
Algorithms compared
6Algorithms compared
  • Engineered domain-specific behavioural and temporal features on a 6.36-million-transaction dataset — account-draining detection, empirically-derived hourly risk tiers and balance-matching flags.
  • Applied statistical outlier analysis with z-score flagging and winsorisation to preserve anomaly signal while controlling extreme-value noise.
  • Compared six algorithms — CatBoost, XGBoost, LightGBM, Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbors and Logistic Regression — addressing severe class imbalance through cost-sensitive class weighting rather than synthetic oversampling.
  • Quantified train/test overfitting analysis confirmed generalisation, outperforming the comparable published studies benchmarked against.
DOI10.5281/zenodo.15618190 →

07 — Background

Education & achievements

Education

  • Bachelor of Information Technology Engineering

    Graduated 22 May 2025

    Royal University of Phnom Penh

  • General English Program — Level 14

    1 Dec 2020

    Stanford American School

  • English Program — Level 12

    13 Jun 2019

    Arizon School

Achievements

22 Oct 2025

Top 20 — Pan-SEA AI Developer Challenge 2025

Placed among 100+ teams across ASEAN in AI Singapore's regional challenge for an AI platform addressing real-world problems. Awarded USD 10,000 in AWS credits to develop and scale the solution.

7 – 20 Aug 2024

International Seminar Delegate, China

Selected as 1 of 8 participants to attend an international seminar on Management and Protection of Nature Reserves for Belt & Road Initiative countries.

22 Dec 2023

Gold Medal — NAVA-Thon Hackathon

Awarded for a Telegram chatbot promoting positive parenting and child protection to combat violence against children.

  • NICC 9th Startup Camp (ICT)

    19 – 22 Jun 2023

    Completed the training course and achieved the required level of competence.

  • Samsung Innovation Campus Scholarship

    5 Apr 2022

    Selected among the top 60 students nationally for an ICT programme covering Python from basic to advanced, and data analysis.

  • Silver Medal — Angkor Mathematics Cambodia

    15 Jan 2022

    Awarded among 2,000+ participants.

  • Mathematics Outstanding Student Cambodia

    15 Oct 2021

    One of the top finalists in the national Mathematics Outstanding Student examination.

Volunteering

  • Registration & Protocol Team — 22nd ASJA–ASCOJA–JAC Symposium28 Jun 2024
  • Ceremony Volunteer — SEA Games & ASEAN Para Games5 May – 9 Jun 2023
  • Protocol Support — Earth Hour23 Mar 2023
  • Event Organising Assistant — Angkor Mathematics Cambodia19 Feb 2023
  • Event Organising Assistant — Math Kangaroo Cambodia11 Dec 2022
Interactive Playground & Collaborations

READY TO COLLABORATE OR EXPERIMENT?

Dive into generative canvas physics and creative developer experiments, or connect directly to build production-grade AI models and full-stack software.

AVAILABLE FOR NEW PROJECTS & CONSULTING • PHNOM PENH & REMOTE
07 — Contact

LET'S WORK TOGETHER

Open to engineering roles and high-impact project collaborations, particularly where machine learning intersects with production software.

Location & Status

Headquarters

Phnom Penh, Cambodia

UTC+7 (Indochina Time) • Open to Remote & Relocation

Current Availability

Available for select full-stack & machine learning engineering contracts and full-time roles.

References available on request.

DUCH PANHATHUN