Elias Zarco
AI, Optimization & Systems
Born and raised in , Mexico — a city an hour away from CDMX.
Toluca is known for its altitude, red chorizo and one of the best football teams in Mexico. This city was my home for the first 18 years of my life. Had to leave to discover who I was.
Early on, I was convinced that was the best way to change the world, so I focused on competitive debate and prepared to study a humanities degree in high school. In my senior year, I realized that if I wanted to create, I had to learn how to build things and systems.
Before doing competitive debate, I rarely voiced my opinions and my concerns. Debate taught me how to be analytical and articulate during discussions.
Made a lot of friends through it and learnt a lot about economics, politics and philosophy.
Not sure which engineering degree to study, I chose the most general one. I came to Georgia Tech for , the best place in the world to study it. I found my focus after two introductory Computer Science classes made me realize software was the tool to bring my ideas to life.
Industrial & Systems Engineering, Data Science & Analytics concentration, with a CS minor in Intelligence.
People ask why an industrial engineer would do well in a software or AI role. ISYE teaches the math you need to understand Machine Learning and AI from a first-principles perspective.
The best thing about IEs is that they can do anything — my peers work in fields ranging from supply chain to banking, operations, consulting and technology.
I have always been interested in the business side of things too. Through I have been able to build solid business fundamentals that help me understand how complex financial systems work.
This interest has been sharpened by my experience in the Georgia Tech Investments Committee, where I helped manage $2M doing fundamental and quantitative analysis.
I learned a ton about financial modeling, valuation methods and public presentations. I have also been part of several business and case competitions that have honed my overall consulting skills.
In the summer of 2025, I had the incredible opportunity of working at on the Gemini Education team. My project focused on creating interactive AI tools to help kids learn school subjects.
Learnt how to be a full stack engineer and built AI systems. Owned my product end to end, from conception to platform integration. Worked mostly with Kotlin for the backend and TypeScript for the frontend.
In my last two years of undergrad I fell in love with the fundamentals of , when I realized it was the ultimate intersection of all the skills I had been developing across my professional and academic experiences.
Optimization is how models get trained. Probability and statistics are the foundation underneath the whole field. Stochastic modeling is what you reach for the moment a system stops being deterministic. The ISYE curriculum was teaching me the machinery of modern ML without calling it that.
The summer after, I was at , implementing AI rather than building it. Getting a model adopted inside an organization is a different problem from getting it to work, and it taught me more about people than about models.
AI Project Manager at HSBC's Transformation Department.
The short version: the hard part was never the modeling. It was the people who had to trust the output, the processes that had to bend around it, and the gap between what a system can do and what an institution is ready to let it do.
What I want next is to keep deepening the technical foundation while pointing it at problems worth solving. Right now that means the intersection of , and what both look like in .
I am currently exploring the applications of optimization theory in modern AI, particularly the intersection of diffusion models and optimization.
Both are industries where a better decision compounds into something physical: a shorter wait, a line that does not stop, a resource that reaches the person who needs it. They are also exactly where industrial engineering has been working for a century, which means the domain knowledge already exists to be borrowed.
On a more personal note, I am passionate about the following things: .
Pretty decent goalkeeper. Avid Toluca FC (best team in Mexico btw) and Bayern Munich fan. Interested in building AI solutions for developing countries.
Closely following geopolitical and ideological developments in Latin America. My favorite three albums — Channel Orange (Frank Ocean), Bocanada (Cerati), Discovery (Daft Punk).
I love spontaneous traveling. Some of my favorite places I have visited: Athens, Ibiza, Lindau, Santa Teresa (CR) and Chiapas, Mexico.
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