Blair Zasitko

Profile

I design AI systems and direct their construction: I write the specification, AI coding agents write the code, and I test what comes back before anything relies on it. Where a model is involved, it proposes and code decides. Before this, and alongside it, I ran operations at The PsychoEd Clinic, where I took a psychoeducational assessment practice from one location to six. I'm looking for AI implementation, solutions or operations roles where both halves of that are useful.

AI systems I have built

I design these, direct AI coding agents to write the code, and review and test the result. I'm not a career programmer, and I can explain and defend every design decision in them. All of them run on a Linux server I administer.

• AI car diagnostician. An agent (Claude) that diagnoses my car through an OBD-II reader. It picks which readings to take next and tells the driver what to do, such as holding 2,000 rpm. On a simulator with six planted faults it found five. How it works
• Personal assistant with an AI agent. A phone app backed by an agent (Claude) that searches and acts on my own email, calendar, documents and photos. It can only change files through one checked command, so its limits are enforced in code rather than by instructions, and it shows its steps on my phone as it works. How it works
• Search across 18 years of personal records. 763,186 dated records from 53 sources, indexed where they sit without moving any originals. Search by meaning covers 891,000 passages and runs on a local embedding model. Before relying on it I checked that it reproduced the reference vectors exactly, and in doing so found a tokenizer bug in the old embedding service that had degraded about 16% of one dataset. How it works
• Photo library with face identification. 24,537 photos and 5,837 faces, with 91 people identified; in held-out testing it was 99.8% accurate. It extends a set of faces I labelled by hand to the rest of the library, and returns "unknown" rather than guess.
• De-identification for clinical notes. Removes patient identifiers locally, so an outside AI model can summarize a note without ever seeing who it is about. The keys that could reverse it belong to a separate system account the application cannot read. 91 automated tests. How it works
• Pulse, a map of Toronto Bike Share. 7.3 million trips reduced to 1.9 MB, so a full week of the city's bike traffic plays on a phone with no server behind it. How it works
• Job-sourcing pipeline. Collects postings from job boards and 22 company career sites, scores them against my background with an LLM, and puts a ranked shortlist in front of me each day. 201 automated tests.

Experience

1. Jul 2023 – present

   Senior Program Manager, Operations & Partnerships

   The PsychoEd Clinic, Toronto

   • Grew the practice from one location to six. I found the sites, negotiated the leases, hired the staff, and turned each opening into a standard process for the next one.
   • Brought Monarch House, one of Canada's largest autism service providers, into a partnership that put one of our assessment clinics inside their flagship Mississauga site. I met their executives in person until they asked for it, then delivered it: psychologists placed, referral rules written, their staff briefed, the room furnished. Projected revenue was $100,000 to $200,000 a year.
   • Set up two more institutional partnerships, with Sunshine Learning (shared premises) and Read Write Think, a private school. With Read Write Think we created what we called psychologically informed direct instruction, structured so that psychological-services insurance could pay for it. Families with coverage but not cash could get top-tier special education.
   • Launched Medically Informed ADHD, an assessment that comes with a psychiatrist attached, so clients leave with a diagnosis and a route to treatment. I recruited the psychiatrist, worked out how records could legally move between two separate health information custodians under PHIPA, and built the workflow it ran on with real patients.
   • Designed a post-secondary ADHD assessment program priced to fit Ontario's BSWD bursary, with OHIP-covered psychiatric follow-up and insurance-eligible coaching.
   • Hired psychiatrists and doctorate-level psychologists. I asked candidates to explain their specialty from the ground up until I understood it, which reliably separated real depth from a good résumé.
   • Oversaw the clinic's Microsoft 365 environment at the management level, and ran intake screening for ADHD assessments.

2. Feb 2016 – Aug 2020

   Founder, Partnerships & Marketing

   ZaPrisco, Toronto

   • Co-founded a small precision-manufacturing business making titanium, brass, stainless steel and hardwood parts for mechanical keyboards, under our own brand and for established ones.
   • Ran sales, marketing and partnerships. The work grew until my manufacturing partner went full time on it.
   • Found our customers through r/skookum, a machining community I started and moderated alone, which grew to about 80,000 members.

3. Mar 2014 – Oct 2015

   Clinical Research Assistant

   Inflamax Research Inc., Mississauga

   • Supported Phase I–IV clinical trials at a contract research organization: protocol adherence, participant coordination, data collection and management. GCP-trained.

Skills

AI and software:

system design and specification, directing and reviewing AI coding agents, retrieval and embeddings, privacy by design under PHIPA.

Operations:

multi-site expansion, site selection and leasing, clinical hiring, intake and waitlist design, OHIP, insurance and BSWD billing, vendor management.

Partnerships:

finding and pursuing partners, structuring agreements, shared-premises arrangements.

Tools:

Python, PostgreSQL with pgvector, DuckDB, SQLite, FastAPI, React and TypeScript, WebGL, ONNX Runtime, Claude and Gemini APIs, Ubuntu Linux, systemd, Caddy, Tailscale, Git, Microsoft 365, Xero.

Education

• B.Sc., Human Biology and Cognitive Science, University of Toronto. Coursework completed 2013; degree conferred 2018.
• Canadian Securities Course (CSC), Canadian Securities Institute, 2022.