Ian Costello

Ian Costello

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Currently Head of Engineering at Rounder. I joined as the first hire, and we just raised our Series A.

Rounder

On the side, I built the world's strongest engine for Open-Face Chinese Poker (a niche poker-pro IYKYK game), then launched a game around it: Upper Hand

I spent a few years at Google. I was the backend tech lead for our $xB/yr channel partner business and worked on AI targeting R&D. Also... squashed a multi-hundred-million-dollar ad fraud surge, opened up a billion new ad impressions per day in GDPR zones, and led strategy initiatives for 3PCD, fingerprinting, ads arbitrage, and more.

Started Easl, a creative meditation app we grew on a tiny budget. People have brought over 100,000 pieces of art into the world thanks to Easl.

Screens from the Easl app

We also hosted a NYC Easl popup!

The Easl popup table, with a Draw Something For A Friend sign and dozens of drawings People drawing at the Easl popup table in a park

Co-founded Lingo AI. We trained novel models for video-to-video AI translation and signed YouTubers with 25M+ subscribers. We launched "en español" channels that landed 10 million views.

Two creators from a Lingo AI-translated channel

I have a few publications in machine learning research. My initial work SC '20 was around building performance profiles of tasks running on 10,000-node DOE supercomputers, then using these profiles for more efficient scheduling.

Load Supercomputer nodes Time → Incoming jobs

Then worked on multi-billion-agent epidemic simulations which could accurately model policy interventions using real-world movement data. IPDPS '25

~1,000 supercomputer nodes Each node: ~1M people Susceptible Infected Recovered 1B+ people at once

Helped bring data science into California high school classrooms with Stanford's Graduate School of Education, part of the movement to modernize math class.

Worked on Kanye's next-gen AI music for Stemplayer (Yeezy Tech x Kano Computing), which splits songs into stems you can remix live.

Vocals Drums Bass Other

Also interned at Google twice (Ad Forecasting and Data Commons), co-ran Startup Shell, UMD's largest student startup community, and was a venture partner at Contrary.