helder@hvasc:~$ whoami
Hélder Vasconcelos
Porto, Portugal 🇵🇹
About
Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder at LayerX. Building AI systems that make it past the demo and into production.
Working on Agentic Workflows, Agentic Harnesses, LLM inference and High Performance Systems. Running and fine-tuning small models on Apple Silicon and Cuda, and putting agents to work inside real engineering pipelines. Most of what I write about lives in the gap between a model that works in a notebook and a system somebody has to operate on a Monday morning.
Nearly two decades of real-time systems underneath. Trading engines at Euronext processing millions of orders, then DeFi protocols securing on-chain capital. Latency, throughput and correctness under load turn out to be the same problem whether you are matching orders or serving tokens.
Shipped Ardaven, TAIKAI, TAIKAI Garden, Luzia API, BakerFi, and other open source products.
Published “Asynchronous Android Programming” (Packt, 2016). Master’s in Electronic and Telecommunications Engineering from University of Aveiro.
Perfectionist by Choice 💎
Side Projects
Luzia
[TypeScript]Price and Market Data Crypto API for Developers: Real-time pricing for centralized exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, Bybit, OKX), on-chain DEX markets (Solana, Ethereum), and tokenized stocks & real-world assets — all through a single unified API.
uberSKILLS
[TypeScript]Design, test, and deploy Claude Code Agent Skills through a visual, AI-assisted workflow.
picogpt-mlx
[Python]A minimal, from-scratch decoder-only GPT in MLX trained on Tiny Shakespeare on Apple Silicon. Inspired by nanoGPT.
postwoman
[Swift]PostWoman 💅 is a lightweight Postman alternative designed specifically for macOS
libmlxforge
[C++]Embeddable, batched MLX LLM engine for Apple Silicon, one C ABI, bound from Node, Swift & Rust. Continuous batching, streaming, JSON-constrained structured output, and embeddings.
pictor
[C++]On-device image generation for Apple Silicon: a C++17 inference engine for FLUX.2 klein 4B on MLX (Metal). Text-to-image, instruction editing, multi-reference — 4-step distilled, stable C ABI, CLI + OpenAI Images API server.
banannate
[TypeScript]The easiest way to generate images with Google Gemini from your Terminal. Fast, efficient, and 4K ready. 🙊🙈🙉
Writing
Enterprise AI Governance: The Layer Between AI and Your Data
How to Control LLM Output: Temperature, Top-P & Beyond
Coding with AI Agents: the 20% nobody talks about
Giving our blog a voice: how we turned posts into audio with open models, locally, on a Mac
Fine-Tuning a Small LLM for Customer Support Pt. 1
Are We Building the Perfect Finance Infrastructure for Machines?
Who Watches the Bots? Building Infrastructure for Agentic Trading at scale
The Agentic Shift: How AI Transformed LayerX Engineering Workflow
Inside BakerFi: Launching a Composable and Secure DeFi Vault Platform
How to launch a Secure DeFi Protocol in 120 Days
Inside the Garden Token Factory - Reinventing Token Launch Stack
10 Key Metrics for Software Development Teams
Smart contracts explained: What are they and how do they work?
Choosing the Right Technology Stack for your SaaS startup
5 Reasons to Host an Internal Hackathon for Your Organization
What’s The Real Cost of Running a DApp on an EOS Blockchain
Choosing the Right Technology Stack for your SaaS startup
How to Capture Disruptive Ideas with Open Innovation Challenges or Hackathons
Asynchronous Android Programming (Author) - Second Edition
Music
Experience
LayerX
Chief Technology Officer
Porto, Portugal · Hybrid
Building TAIKAI, Bepro , BakerFi, ChainCast and other web3 products.
Euronext
Tech Lead
Porto e Região, Portugal
Optiq Commercial Tech Lead. Building Optiq, a realtime trading engine for the European Stock Exchange.
Axway
Senior Software Engineer
Dublin, Ireland
Implementation, design and development of features for Axway APIGateway and API Manager. APIGateway application tuning for high level of demand usage scenarios. Cryptography and OpenSSL Programming. APIGateway Java and C/C++ integration with cryptographic external HSM devices.
Airtel ATN
Senior Software Engineer
Dublin, Ireland
Contributed to ATN (Aeronautical Communication network) CM, CPDLC and ADS-C Test Tools by designing/developing several new features and resolving existing bugs.
PT Inovação
Telecommunications & Software Engineer
Aveiro, Portugal
Designed and Developed IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), SMS and Mobile software solutions to Portugal Telecom Group. Supported other interns in various development and learning tasks. Collaborated with 24/7 support team solving production issues.
Monocline Records
Record Label Manager
Aveiro e Região, Portugal
Product Management and Web Development.
Education
Universidade de Aveiro
Master in Electronic and Telecommunications Engineering