---
title: "Robert McHardy"
category: "people"
role: "Pre-training Lead"
company: "poolside"
linkedin: "https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-mchardy"
twitter: "https://x.com/robert_mchardy"
website: "https://www.robertmchardy.de"
sourceLabels: ["Official speaker roster", "Official conference schedule"]
---
# Robert McHardy

## Profile
Pre-training Lead at [[poolside|poolside]].

- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-mchardy)
- [X / Twitter](https://x.com/robert_mchardy)
- [Website](https://www.robertmchardy.de)

## Biography
Team and tech lead for pre-training at [[poolside|poolside]], where he trains large language models for code. Recently led the pre-training of Laguna XS.2 and M.1, [[poolside|poolside]]'s first two public open-weight models. Before that, Robert worked as a Senior Researcher at AssemblyAI where he trained multilingual speech models, and previously built AI for cancer and infectious-disease research at InstaDeep and BioNTech's joint lab. MSc in Machine Learning from UCL.

## Conference Sessions
- [[2026-06-29-robert-mchardy-the-messy-reality-of-scale-synthetic-data-and-pre-training-at-poolside]] — The Messy Reality of Scale: Synthetic Data and Pre-Training at Poolside (2026-06-29, 11:10am-11:30am)

## Evidence Graph
This evidence graph summarizes how this person appears across the conference source graph: scheduled sessions, linked videos, transcripts, and slide-derived evidence.

### Linked Sessions
- [[2026-06-29-robert-mchardy-the-messy-reality-of-scale-synthetic-data-and-pre-training-at-poolside|The Messy Reality of Scale: Synthetic Data and Pre-Training at Poolside]]

### Media Signals
No linked video, transcript, or slide source has been attached yet.