Simon Quick

Applied AI Engineer in Sydney

I'm a Sydney-based Lead AI Engineer at Pollen, specialising in production LLM systems, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic workflows, AI evaluation and observability.

Recent work includes Wizen, an agentic search platform for regulated organisations across government and healthcare that handles millions of queries annually; Clara, a Webby-nominated AI health companion with 87% specialist approval and 90% of specialists saying they would recommend it to patients; and Rebuilt, a product carbon-footprint platform for the construction industry.

My work covers the full applied AI product lifecycle: identifying viable use cases, designing retrieval and orchestration architectures, building evaluation and guardrail systems, operating production infrastructure, and turning early prototypes into reliable products.

Before Pollen, I founded Sound Shelter, a vinyl marketplace I grew from zero to more than 100,000 users while leading its engineering, product, design and commercial development.

I was also a founding engineer at Youcheck, a Google DNI-funded misinformation product using natural-language processing, and the first technical hire for HomeAway in the Asia-Pacific region before its acquisition by Expedia.

I write about applied AI, RAG systems, agents and production AI engineering. I also maintain Fetch Engines, an open-source toolkit for reliable web-content extraction into Markdown and structured data. I also DJ and produce music - you can find my stuff on SoundCloud and see my recent Bandcamp purchases below.