Tom Tran Jr
Forward Deployed Engineer at Arango
I'm a Forward Deployed Engineer at Arango. I help teams in the federal and national security space build AI on their own data. My day-to-day is graph modeling, AQL traversals, and GraphRAG and vector search retrieval, tuned to each customer's environment.
Before Arango, I built data pipelines at the U.S. Department of State. Seeing how much of that manual work an LLM could take over is what pulled me into AI.
I also serve in the California Air National Guard's 129th Rescue Wing, where I'm a founding member of its AI unit.
Experience
- Forward Deployed Engineer, Arango2026 to now
- Gen AI Engineer, Arango2025 to 2026
- E/E Systems Specialist, 129th Rescue Wing, CA Air National Guard2023 to now
- Data Analysis Intern, U.S. Department of State2022 to 2023
Education
- M.S. Data Science and AI, University of San Francisco
- B.S. Applied Mathematics, UCLA
Recent projects
- 2026Next Bracket
Score your Air Force fitness test and see what it takes to reach the next bracket. Live for Airmen at my wing.
- 2026DocQFlow
A small ML service that sorts incoming permit PDFs by type. Train on labeled folders, score uploads through FastAPI, and track runs in MLflow.
- 2026canvas-control
A CLI and MCP server for Canvas LMS. Pull course files, check grades, and ask about classes from one place.