As a backend engineer, I mainly worked on the planning and execution part of the agent system. Once a research request comes in, this component breaks the work into smaller steps, tracks which steps are running or completed, and handles failures or retries. My focus was making that workflow reliable, especially for long-running research tasks.
HL
Open to opportunities
Hechao Li
@hechaoli
I build scalable AI, search, and distributed systems powering millions of requests.
United StatesWhat I'm looking for
At OpenAI, I lead backend architecture for the Deep Research API, building distributed agent orchestration, document ingestion, vector retrieval, RAG, and LLM observability systems for citation-backed research across web-scale and enterprise data.
Previously at Netflix, I built LLM-integrated conversational search and personalized ranking infrastructure with sub-second serving performance. At Facebook, I developed transaction, consensus, execution, and storage systems for Diem, and at VMware Wavefront, I built high-scale time-series ingestion, analytics, and anomaly detection platforms.
Experience
Work history, roles, and key accomplishments
Current
Led backend architecture for a distributed agent orchestration system, designing DAG-based planning and fault-tolerant workflows. Built scalable document ingestion and vector retrieval pipelines for large-scale semantic search.
Education
Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework
Carnegie Mellon University
Master of Science, Computer Science
2015 - 2016
Pursued a Master's degree in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University from 2015 to 2016.
Availability
Open to opportunities
Location
United StatesAuthorized to work in
Job categories
Software EngineerBackend EngineerDistributed Systems EngineerMachine Learning EngineerAI EngineerSearch EngineerData EngineerPlatform EngineerSoftware Engineer DeveloperSoftware DeveloperIT Software EngineerSoftware Engineer JobsEngineering Software DeveloperSoftware EngineerSoftware Systems EngineerSoftware Engineering Jobs
Skills
PythonJavaTypeScriptC++RustSQLfastAPISpring BootNode.Js DevelopmentgRPCREST APIsLLMRAGAgentic AIVector SearchVector DatabasesEmbeddingsNLPInformation RetrievalKnowledge GraphsAWSGCPDockerKubernetesTerraformKafkaRedisPostgreSQLPrometheusGrafanaMicroservices ArchitectureEvent Driven ArchitectureConsensus AlgorithmsFault ToleranceModel ServingFeature EngineeringRanking SystemsAnomaly DetectionTime Series AnalyticsRocksDBDynamoDBCassandraFaissOpenSearchMetaflowRayBlockchainNodeJSJSONWavefrontJSON RPCTime AnalyticsDBsMaestro
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