Company

A company you can hire, with a product you can evaluate.

Qompute AI is a Las Vegas technology company. Its engineers deploy private AI and secure high-risk AI workflows for clients under written scope, and build qore, a platform for governed local AI that is in private preview.

Qompute AI, Inc.Delaware corporationHeadquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada
What we do

Two lines of work, one team.

Services
AI security assessment and testing; Private-AI deployment and integration; Embedded security engineering. Scoped in writing, fees stated up front, led by the founders. Services
Product
qore runs open-weight models and agent workflows inside a security boundary with named users, tool policy, and an audit record. Private preview, by request. qore
How they relate
Client work stands on its own; no engagement requires qore, and preview access is not a purchase. The same two engineers do both, which is why the product reflects what investigators and operators actually need from a record.
How we work

Written scope, recorded decisions, handover your people can run.

Authorized and bounded

Adversarial work runs only under signed rules of engagement with named systems, approved test identities, and stop conditions. The template is public.

Evidence over adjectives

Findings follow a written standard another senior operator can reproduce. Product claims carry stated limitations, and nothing here is described as certified or validated when it is not.

Ownership transfers

Engagements end with runbooks, queries, configuration records, and a named owner on the client side. Renting our attention is the exception, agreed explicitly.

Engineering and delivery

The people who deliver the work and build the product.

Derek Hinch

Founder and Chief Technology Officer

Leads: qore end to end: product architecture, the inference runtime, the agent engine, and the cryptographic subsystems; research and development; adversarial testing and builder enablement on engagements.

Derek is the mind behind qore. Its architecture, inference runtime, agent engine and cryptographic subsystems are his design, and most of the code is his. He started in U.S. Air Force avionics-based electronic warfare, in research, development, and operational test and evaluation of systems that had to work against a live adversary, and went from there to hyperscale cloud security at Amazon, working at the level of the company's senior leadership team, and then to security consulting at NCC Group. In 2017 the Electric Coin Company hired him through NCC Group to both run and attack the Zcash key-generation ceremony: under the pseudonym Moses Spears he hosted a ceremony compute node in a secure facility, performed real-time and post-hoc forensics on it, and mounted memory attacks on a replica of the ceremony machine; the published audit found no fatal vulnerability. Before Qompute AI he co-founded CQ Systems and was chief technology officer and director of research and development at CQurity Systems, working on post-quantum encryption, compression and AI. He has been finding and disclosing vulnerabilities for more than two decades; his earliest public CVEs date from 2002. His research runs from the 2024 quaternion neural-network paper recorded in Labs to the Q-Factor substrate inside qore: Hamilton-Hilbert lossless transforms, the Hinch-Lagrange full-chain cipher, access decided by algebra rather than by rows in a policy table, and a biometric key ceremony designed so there is no toxic waste to destroy. He publishes tools in the open as well, including the H3X binary-analysis toolkit and the SWIVEL counter-surveillance framework.

2017
Zcash key-generation ceremony, for the Electric Coin Company through NCC Group: ran a ceremony node and attacked it as the designated adversary and forensic verifier. Reported by CoinDesk and in the Electric Coin Company's audit results.
2024
Quaternion neural-network research: a dense layer on the Hamilton product reaching 98.04% on MNIST with 49,170 parameters. Recorded in Labs with its limitations.
2025 to 2026
The Q-Factor cryptographic substrate inside qore, including the Hinch-Lagrange full-chain cipher: a two-pass, non-commutative quaternion chain over a 256-bit prime field with measured full avalanche.
Open tools
H3X, a Hamilton-Hilbert-Hinch wavelet transition toolkit for binary structural analysis; SWIVEL, a counter-surveillance framework; QET, a quaternion encryption tool.
Since 2002
Vulnerability research with public CVEs (CVE-2002-1699, CVE-2002-1720) and two decades of red-team and forensic work since.
Writing
"The Convergence of Cognition and Cryptography: Architecting a Zero-Trust AI Fabric" (2026) and "The Original Sin of AI" (2025), on prompt injection as a property of the architecture rather than a bug.
RuntimeAgentsCryptographyResearch

Joey Victorino

VP, Infrastructure and Security

Leads: Client engagements end to end: assessment, deployment, incident support; qore's deployment infrastructure and security architecture.

Incident-response practitioner with more than a decade on nation-state intrusions, ransomware, and advanced persistent threats across a global cloud provider's response practice, an endpoint-security firm, and a Fortune 100 technology consultancy. M.S. Cybersecurity; CISSP and eleven GIAC certifications in forensics, malware analysis, and detection engineering. Fluent in English, Spanish, and Russian.

InfrastructureSecurityForensics
Company leadership
NameRoleBackground
Dale ZellerChief Executive OfficerRetired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel; former joint task force CIO, bank CIO, and program manager for a multi-billion-dollar satellite terminal program. Leads strategy, operations, and compliance.
Frank FalboChief Operating OfficerLicensed professional engineer and attorney with more than thirty-five years leading and scaling ventures in complex industries.
William CroninChief Financial OfficerMore than thirty-five years in financial services and public-company governance.
Karen A. Kerames, CPATreasurerCPA with more than thirty years across finance, enterprise systems, and operational consulting.
Josh SchwartzChief Marketing OfficerBrand, marketing, and go-to-market.
Desirae MarieChief of StaffOrganizational execution and operating cadence.
Tuck RossmillerDirector of Public RelationsExternal communications and media.

Employers are named only where the work is public record; otherwise they are described generically on purpose. Named references are available to qualified parties during scoping or diligence.

Working here

Expressions of interest.

These are hiring priorities, not posted openings with approved budgets. When a role is funded it will be listed here with scope, location, arrangement, and process. Until then, tell us what you would build.

Careers

Where

Headquartered in Las Vegas.

Qompute AI, Inc., a Delaware corporation. Principal office: 6166 South Sandhill Road, Las Vegas, NV 89120, United States.

Engagements run remotely on your hardware over your screen-share, or on site in the United States for isolated environments.