Nathan Lara
Background

Experience

Professional roles, education, and leadership. For the full history, see the résumé.

Professional

Jun – Aug 2026
New York, NY

AI Product Builder

BCG X

Boston Consulting Group · New York, NY

  • Own the quality-evaluation workstream for the CFS Starter-Kit — a reusable-AI-component platform (Project Helix) — building its first scoring rubric and an automated TypeScript/Vitest harness that set the recall / precision / critical-recall baselines the team measures against.
  • Build a ground-truth benchmark against the real product modules that resets the platform's headline retrieval metric from 71% on synthetic prompts to ~15% on real builds — exposing a structural coverage cap the synthetic tests had hidden.
  • Rebuild block-retrieval scoring from flat keyword overlap to BM25 with field-weighting and stemming, and layer on synonym-mapping and dependency-expansion levers that raise measured recall to ~90% and cut the plain-language vocabulary gap from 38% to 13%.
  • Design a persona-by-prompting-skill evaluation that exposes how skill-sensitive retrieval is, then shows the chat's clarifying-question flow recovers weak prompters — lifting novice results from ~35% to 71%.
  • Ship block retrieval into the v2 assembly chat and a Claude Desktop MCP server (block search / bundle), plus a relevance floor that returns nothing on off-domain queries instead of a misleading best-of list.
  • Surface data-integrity and coverage defects that automated scoring catches but manual review had missed — broken cross-references across 37% of the catalog, and a home-screen module with zero catalogued components.
May 2026 – Present
Remote

Independent Contractor — AI & Content

OCI Group Consulting

Remote

  • Designed and delivered an 8-module AI enablement program for the firm's partners — deployed as a self-serve web portal (Vercel), not a slide deck — covering Gemini/Claude/ChatGPT workflows, prompt engineering, and AI governance, tailored live to their actual stack.
  • Built the credentials deck the firm used in a live pitch for a role on a multi-billion-dollar development project — synthesizing a dozen+ conflicting source proposals into one narrative across 11 client-feedback revisions; the deck advanced the partnership and is being productized into a reusable template.
Jan – May 2026
New York, NY

AI Agent Developer

PwC

Capstone Project × Fordham

  • Automated end-to-end M&A deal monitoring across 51 live sources via a RAG pipeline (LangChain, Chroma, GPT-4o) with 8-K parsing, MD5 dedup, and daily scheduling.
  • Built a structured extraction and SEC XBRL enrichment pipeline, cutting deal-attribute extraction from hours to sub-minute output while standardizing 10+ fields.
  • Delivered a self-service dashboard replacing ad-hoc research requests with a persistent intelligence layer.
Jan – May 2026
New York, NY

AI Graduate Consultant

United Nations

Office of Legal Affairs · with Fordham

  • Delivered UN-LEX as a production tool adopted by the UN Office of Legal Affairs as its primary research interface across 9,000+ UNDT/UNAT cases spanning 15+ years of precedent.
  • Reduced case-law research time from hours to minutes — on-demand precedent lookup by fact pattern or misconduct type, with paragraph-level citations, delivered inside Microsoft Teams.
  • Captured senior officers' precedent expertise into a durable, queryable system — cutting onboarding time and mitigating operational risk from attorney turnover.
2023 – 2025
San Antonio, TX

Internship · Tutoring · Public sector

Earlier roles

  • Lead Tutor, First Generation Investors — led a team of four tutors delivering weekly personal-finance sessions (stocks, bonds, diversification, dollar-cost averaging) at two San Antonio high schools; guided students through a capstone where each invested $100 of real money.
  • Municipal Intern, Bexar County — documented weekly court proceedings under Judge Melissa Saenz (arraignments, bench trials, sentencing), researched local/state/federal statutes, and discussed case law and judicial reasoning directly with the judge.
  • Procurement Analyst Intern, Security Service FCU — managed contracts, POs, assets, and vendor records in System Center Service Manager, and ran IT device lifecycle: imaging, deployment, and secure decommissioning of PCs, laptops, and phones.

Education

May 2026

Gabelli School of Business

Fordham · MS, Artificial Intelligence in Business · New York, NY

Coursework

Artificial Intelligence · Machine Learning for Business · Quantitative Foundations for AI · Agentic AI with Copilot · AI for Strategic Decision Making · Data Management with SQL · Law & Ethics of AI · Python for AI

In Progress

New York University

Tandon Bridge — Computer Science Certificate · New York, NY

May 2025

The University of Texas at San Antonio

BBA, Finance — Minor in Economics · San Antonio, TX

Coursework

Principles of Investment · Debt Markets · Intro to Risk Management · Cases & Problems in Finance · Business Finance for Entrepreneurs · Computer Modeling for Financial Applications · Intro to Mathematical Economics · Intermediate Accounting

Leadership

Selected
Sep 2025 – May 2026The Artificial Intelligence SocietyNew York, NYAVP, AI Research & Technology
Sep 2025 – May 2026Fordham Gabelli School of BusinessNew York, NYGraduate Campus Ambassador
Sep 2025 – May 2026Toastmasters at GabelliNew York, NYSecretary
Jun 2022 – PresentNational Hispanic InstituteNational · TX & CONational Collegiate Staff Member
May 2024 – Jun 2025UTSA Business Student CouncilSan Antonio, TXChief Executive Officer
May 2024 – Jun 2025Delta Sigma Pi, Omicron PhiSan Antonio, TXChancellor
Feb – Jun 2025UTSA Alvarez College of BusinessSan Antonio, TXStrategic Planning Committee
Jan – Aug 2024The Investment Society at UTSASan Antonio, TXDirector of Investment Research

Awards & Honors

Apr 2026vibeFORWARD Hackathon1st PlaceAI Blocks →
Mar 2026Grayscale Hackathon1st PlaceAEGIS →
May 2025UTSA Alvarez College of Business2nd Place — Corporate Entrepreneurship Pitch
Apr 2025Delta Sigma Pi, Omicron PhiCollegian of the Year
Dec 2024National Hispanic InstituteCollege Student of the Year1 of 2 nationwide