The longer story

I'm Declan Kene Chukwu, a computer science student at University College Dublin (class of 2027) working across the stack of modern AI, from the microkernels that make inference fast on Arm CPUs to the multi-agent systems that put LLMs to work on real operational problems.

Right now I'm a software engineer intern at Apple in Cork, building a Root Cause Analysis Engine for the Global Voice Services team: LangGraph agents, guardrailed MCP servers on Kubernetes, and a PII tokenisation pipeline that keeps sensitive data away from models. Before that I spent a summer at Arm in Galway integrating KleidiAI™ microkernels into ONNX Runtime and building the C++ profiling tools to measure the gains.

What keeps me here is building innovative solutions to some of the world's biggest problems. Software gives you that freedom, and I'm all for it. It lets me take the rigid, logical side of computer science and run it straight into the more inventive side of how I think. That intersection is exactly why I keep going back to hackathons.

Highlights

• Winner, ServiceNow Code to Win hackathon (CareFlow AI)
• Selected from 5,000+ applicants for HackEurope 2026
• Selected from 1,800+ applicants for HackUPC 2026, Barcelona
• Selected from 500+ for the Google Ireland Hackathon by BGN
• Invited to the Paris YC Startup Summer School
• Judge, IBM Z × UNSA Sheridan global hackathon
• Irish National Squad, basketball (2022/23)

Guitar

I picked up the guitar during lockdown and got good enough to play in my church choir. Flamenco, contemporary pop and gospel: three traditions that ask completely different things of your right hand.

These days it's more party trick than practice. I don't really sit down to learn songs any more; I pull up the tabs for something I already love and strum along. Getting to the point where that just works is its own kind of fluency, I think.

The one I keep coming back to is Que Bonito by Rosario Flores, the calmest, most soothing thing I've learned, and the closest my two hobbies come to meeting.

Spanish

Spanish started as a secondary school subject and turned into the one that stuck. I've always loved language learning, and Spanish culture pulled me the rest of the way in.

An Erasmus exchange put me in a room with Spanish, Bulgarian, Italian and Polish students. I got closest to the Spanish group, close enough that practising stopped feeling like practice, and close enough that I went to visit them that same summer.

Since then it's been a lot of Spanish music, Duolingo when it suits, speaking whenever I meet a Spanish speaker, and a full semester of B2. Certification is the next target.

Now

Wrapping up my internship at Apple and getting ready for the next academic year at UCD. Learning as much about agentic AI as I can, still building SafeHaven, and trying to make the most of this moment in the industry. It has the same early, wide-open feel that web3 had, and it's a gold mine of opportunity if you're paying attention.