Dénes Tornyi
About
I thrive in interdisciplinary environments, as my goal is to integrate different perspectives of existence. I believe that human development is driven more by emotion than by technology alone. I wish to believe in a society where people are not just building blocks, but individuals who actively take part in the system they form.
Born in 1996. My earliest exposure to technology was the single computer in our household without an internet connection. I spent my days playing video games and exploring the file system, clicking on every installed executable and daydreaming about a database engine that could link documents and render multimedia content seamlessly. During the summer of 2006, I stumbled upon the digital manual of the video game StarCraft written in HTML3 and was astonished by the rendering capabilities of Internet Explorer 6. Despite having no knowledge of English and no formal training, I learned HTML by dissecting the source code of the manual.
Since that summer, my passion for learning has never faded. I have experimented with various technologies, including cross-platform desktop applications, web applications, embedded applications, video-game projects, natural language processing (NLP) applications and algorithmic challenges.
Nowadays I am focusing on learning mathematics and writing an open-source on-the-fly SQL interpreter.
Besides working, I am a Linux and FOSS enthusiast; in love with literature, music, theater and cinema.
References
Nokia Solutions and Networks Kft.
2024 March – 2025 December
Recommendation letters: Riku Kaura-Aho, Alonso Silva
Presentations: Structured code generation for domain-specific languages
Returned to Nokia with the goal of continuing my research on LLMs and RAG systems in Riku Kaura-Aho's team. Established Project Octopus as a centralized project space for publishing and inner-sourcing NLP solutions across the company. Collaborated with various departments to streamline and reduce the internal chaos within R&D operations.
Conducted research about a pipeline architecture inside PostgreSQL using PGRX to write extensions in Rust that minimized HTTP 1.1/SQL communication overhead between services. The design integrated chunking, embedding and retrieval into a single monolithic database process using fastembed and pgvector.
Designed and implemented a microservice based data warehouse megaproject along with a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline composed of 14 independent Go microservices that were coordinated through a shared PostgreSQL database. The most notable challenges were converting every incoming document to Markdown; writing a reusable TF-IDF library which validated documents and produced their sparse embeddings; implementing a chunking service which broke up text along natural language separators (between paragraphs, sentences or words); and figuring out the right architecture to universally support any dense embedding model, any vector database and any third-party front-end UI. The entire solution was deployed via Docker and used HTTP/1.1 and SQL for inter-service communication.
Conducted research in collaboration with Alonso Silva from Bell Labs. Architected and implemented a Go-based predictor machine which enforced SQL grammatical and semantic constraints for basic SELECT queries, ensuring field and table consistency throughout either the user input or the generative iterations of an LLM.
Designed and implemented a repository of reusable Go packages for cross-project code sharing. The most notable packages were archive, which solved the algorithmically complex challenge of orchestrating multiple concurrent streams into a single stream, enabling parallel log collection from K8s nodes and on-the-fly merging the incoming log streams into a single tape archive; and httpdump, which provided a transparent HTTP transport middleware for capturing, dumping and replaying HTTP network communication.
ScoutinScience B.V.
2023 August – 2024 January
Designed and implemented a matchmaking system to connect local university graduates with local companies (in the Netherlands) by processing company websites and student theses to construct an NxN similarity matrix that described their likeliness of sharing a mutual interest.
Beyond the main project, conducted code reviews, refined the company's CI/CD pipeline and refactored the existing user management architecture to support not only roles but also fine-grained per-user permissions by forking and pruning the AuthPermissions.AspNetCore library.
Nokia Solutions and Networks Kft.
2022 March – 2023 June
Designed and implemented (in Go using the K8s Operator SDK) an update orchestrator and an update receiver service to handle firmware rollouts for customer-owned hardware. Developed a MinIO-based firmware storage service with synchronization between regional data centers along with the implementation of HTTP range headers on S3 objects and client-side tools for managing firmware entries.
Accedo Broadband HU Kft.
2018 March – 2021 February
Contributed to the development OTT client-side applications for WebOS, Tizen and Web platforms (for Yle, OSN, NRK, ProSieben, Deutsche Telekom and HBO) using JavaScript with an internally developed library and ReactJS. At peak supported 10 different applications with bug fixes as a support engineer.
Designed and implemented a real-time third-party API validator middleware between the application and the network layer; containerized CI/CD toolset for Tizen and WebOS; an internal service operated inside Amazon AWS to synchronize Salesforce time tracking with the BambooHR calendar.
Youwon Hungary Kft.
2014 July – 2015 May
Contributed to the development of an online second-hand marketplace using TypeScript and AngularJS on the client side, C# and ASP.NET Web API 4 on the server side and Entity Framework 6 for database management with Apache Lucene indexing.
Designed and implemented a Facebook Messenger like service using WebRTC and SignalR over the existing architecture: enabling audio/video calls, text messages along with their message history and the synchronization of ongoing conversation tabs across devices.