Ismail Ben Alla

Data & AI Engineer at Dailymotion · Paris, France

I build deep learning systems from scratch. Agentic AI · RAG · LLM evaluation. Then I ship them as real products.

I’m an AI engineer at Dailymotion in Paris, where I build data and AI pipelines on GCP: LLM-powered enrichment, multilingual retrieval, evaluation against human-reviewed golden datasets, and MCP-based agents. Before that I built document-extraction agents at Monce.ai, real-time voice conversion at SteelSeries, and multilingual legal RAG at Juridia.

I studied artificial intelligence at École Centrale Lyon (MSc) and computer science at ENSA Fès, where I graduated top of my class. In my own time I rebuild deep learning systems from scratch — GPTs, Vision Transformers, autograd — because I don’t understand something until I’ve built it.

View projects CVEmail GitHub LinkedIn My links

What I’m building

Products I develop on my own time and want to put in people’s hands.

Qlaver
Agentic email assistant: it summarizes your inbox the way you like and sends you the summary as audio. Private for now.
FastAPI · React · ElevenLabs · AWS
Kinetra
AI fitness companion: a camera coach that counts reps on the phone, a body scan from one photo, and a moderated community.
FastAPI · React Native · MediaPipe · ONNX
Glitch
Android app that shuffles your apps so you look before you tap. No permissions, no internet, no tracking.
Kotlin · Jetpack Compose · Material 3

Experience

Data & AI Engineer
Jun 2026 – Present
Dailymotion · Ray AI Platform · Paris, France
- Built Airflow pipelines using Gemini with Google Search grounding to enrich web, app, and CTV sitelists with descriptions, IAB categories, and language metadata.
- Developed BigQuery-to-Qdrant ingestion and multilingual retrieval with English-normalized context, semantic search, and LLM reranking.
- Designed web-scraping workflows and LangSmith evaluation using human-reviewed golden datasets and ranking metrics.
- Developed an LLM-powered Alert Agent that pairs Gemini with MCP clients and dedicated Airflow, GCP, and BigQuery MCP servers to investigate pipeline, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, and SQL incidents from Slack alerts.
- Led a data-lineage technology assessment across BigQuery, Airflow, dbt, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, GCS, and BI, and prototyped an OpenLineage runtime integration.
AI Engineer
Sep 2025 – Jun 2026
Monce.ai · LLM-powered data extraction · France
- Designed a human-in-the-loop feedback system for continuous agent improvement, increasing document-extraction accuracy by about 18%.
- Built a modular agent evaluation framework covering 10+ metrics, including precision, recall, hallucination rate, and latency.
- Refactored LangChain / LlamaIndex extraction workflows with asynchronous processing, reducing average processing time by about 35%.
AI Engineer
Apr 2025 – Sep 2025
SteelSeries · Real-time voice conversion · France
- Built a PyTorch and ONNX voice-conversion system with end-to-end latency below 80 ms.
- Developed real-time multi-voice blending on top of the LLVC architecture.
- Improved MOS by 0.3 points over the StreamVC baseline through targeted fine-tuning and waveform post-processing.
J
AI Engineer
Jan 2024 – Jul 2024
Juridia · RAG-powered legal AI · Morocco
- Designed and deployed an Arabic / French RAG system with FastAPI, LlamaIndex, PostgreSQL, and Qdrant, with average query latency below 350 ms.
- Improved retrieval precision by 18–22% with cross-encoder reranking, BM25 + dense hybrid search, and multilingual embeddings.
- Built a search interface supporting keyword, semantic, and metadata search across 100k+ legal documents.
Q
Independent AI Engineer
2024 – Present
Qlaver · AI email-management agent · Remote
Details
- An agent that summarizes email to each user’s preferences and delivers the summary as audio.
- Private project: I see real potential in it, so the code and the details stay closed for now.
Computer Vision Engineer (Intern)
Aug 2023 – Sep 2023
3D Smart Factory · Autonomous-driving perception · Morocco
Details
- Developed YOLO and SegNet models for object detection and semantic segmentation in autonomous-vehicle images.
- Trained and optimized the models in PyTorch on Kaggle GPUs with the Mapillary Vistas dataset, then deployed them on FPGA with Vivado.
Machine Learning Engineer (Intern)
Jul 2023 – Aug 2023
3D Smart Factory · LLM pre-training & evaluation · Morocco
Details
- Pre-trained and fine-tuned GPT-2 on a custom scientific corpus for academic Q&A generation.
- Built reproducible training with PyTorch Lightning and Weights & Biases, evaluated with BLEU, ROUGE, and perplexity.
- Generated training data with the OpenAI API and cleaned text with NLP tools such as Hunspell, SymSpell, FuzzyWuzzy, TextBlob, and spaCy.
Data Science Intern
Jun 2023 – Jul 2023
Technocolabs Softwares · Credit-risk analytics · India (remote)
Details
- Built a predictive analysis pipeline for early-repayment risk on bank loans with TensorFlow, Pandas, and NumPy.
- Applied ANOVA, regression analysis, chi-squared and hypothesis tests, PCA, RFE, and mutual information for feature analysis and selection.
- Handled preprocessing, exploratory analysis, and visualization with Matplotlib and Seaborn.
DB
Web & AI Developer (Intern)
Aug 2022 – Oct 2023
Dev-Bay · Web platform & recommendations · Morocco
Details
- Developed the official Dev-Bay website, improving its features and responsive design.
- Built a recommendation system based on user behaviour using a classification model.

Selected projects

Alert Agent — MCP-Powered Incident Investigation
Agents · Jun 2026 · Completed
Code is private (company / client work)
An LLM agent at Dailymotion that picks up data-platform alerts from Slack and investigates them through dedicated MCP servers for Airflow, GCP, and BigQuery.
Built with: GeminiMCPAirflowBigQueryGCPSlack
Read more → Alert Agent
NatVC — Real-Time Neural Voice Conversion
Audio · Sep 2025 · Completed
Code is private (company / client work)
Any-to-any voice conversion that runs in real time under a live-application latency budget — my Centrale Lyon MSc thesis, carried out during my internship at SteelSeries.
Built with: PyTorchAccelerate (multi-GPU)StreamVCLLVCTensorBoard
Read more → NatVC
Code-Hinter — AI Grading Inside VS Code
LLM apps · Apr 2025 · Completed
GitHub: Code-HinterDemo video: Code-HinterWeb app codeWeb app demo
A Centrale Lyon team project: professors create exercises in VS Code, students submit from the editor, and an AI model grades against the professor’s criteria.
Built with: TypeScriptVS Code APIPythonFlaskNext.js
Read more → Code-Hinter
Bilingual Net — English ↔ Darija Translation
Generative AI · Apr 2025 · Completed
GitHub: Bilingual NetDemo video: Bilingual Net
A from-scratch encoder–decoder Transformer for translation between English and Moroccan Darija — a low-resource dialect — with residual pre-LN attention and five decoding strategies.
Built with: PyTorchStreamlitPoetryBeam search
Read more → Bilingual Net
Juridia — Multilingual Legal RAG
RAG · Jul 2024 · Completed
Code is private (company / client work)
A production retrieval and question-answering system for more than 100,000 Arabic and French legal documents, combining semantic, keyword, and metadata search.
Built with: FastAPIPostgreSQLQdrantLlamaIndexReact
Read more → Juridia
Tiny LLM — GPT-2 Reimplemented From Scratch
Generative AI · Aug 2023 · Completed
GitHub: Tiny LLM
A GPT-2-style model rebuilt from scratch during my 3D Smart Factory internship: Flash Attention, pre-LayerNorm blocks, and LoRA fine-tuning. My most-starred repo.
Built with: PyTorchLoRAOpenWebText
Read more → Tiny LLM

See all 37 projects →

Lab notes

4 Jun 2026Flash Attention was a clean drop-in win in my from-scratch GPT
20 May 2026Three patch-embedding strategies, three different ViTs
28 Apr 2026Decoding strategy changed translation quality more than the model did
15 Mar 2026Latency reshaped the whole architecture in real-time voice conversion
10 Feb 2026Building autograd from scratch demystified backprop for good

All lab notes →

Education

MSc in Artificial Intelligence (Research)
Sep 2024 – Oct 2025
École Centrale Lyon · Lyon, France
Computer Science Engineering Degree — top of the 2024 class
Sep 2019 – Aug 2024
National School of Applied Sciences (ENSA) Fès · Fès, Morocco

Leadership & community

Project Leader
2021 – 2024
IEEE ENSA Fès Student Branch
Coordinated student projects in AI and robotics, managed teams, and organized scientific events.
Co-founder
2022 – 2024
INFO-CHAIN — Computer Science & Blockchain Club
Organized and led workshops on blockchain, collaborative development, and student leadership.
Web Project Leader
Sep 2021 – Feb 2023
JEEF — Junior Enterprise of ENSA Fès
Supervised web projects for clients, managed partner relations, and coordinated project communication.