Open to opportunities

Qiang Zhang

@qiangzhang

I’m a Senior AI/ML Engineer with 10+ years of experience building production-scale AI systems, specializing in LLMs, AI infrastructure and so on

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m looking for a role where I can work on challenging AI problems and build production systems that create real impact. I’m particularly interested in opportunities involving LLMs, generative AI, AI agents, multimodal systems, and AI infrastructure, where I can combine my experience in machine learning, software engineering, and distributed systems.

I am an AI/ML Engineer with 10+ years of experience building production-scale software systems, with a recent focus on large language models, AI infrastructure, LLM post-training, and agentic AI systems. My career has focused on turning advanced AI research into reliable products by combining deep machine learning expertise with strong software engineering and distributed systems foundations.

I have designed and built AI platforms and applications involving LLM-powered workflows, model evaluation, inference optimization, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool-calling agents, and multi-step AI orchestration. My experience includes building scalable backend services, ML pipelines, deployment platforms, and cloud-native infrastructure that support high-performance AI applications in production environments.

I enjoy solving challenging engineering problems at the intersection of AI research and real-world product needs — improving model quality, reducing latency and cost, designing reliable evaluation frameworks, and creating systems that users can trust. I have worked with technologies including Python, PyTorch, Hugging Face, LangChain/LangGraph, vector databases, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS/Azure/GCP, and modern CI/CD and observability systems.

Beyond individual contribution, I enjoy technical leadership: mentoring engineers, driving architecture decisions, collaborating with product and research teams, and helping organizations adopt AI responsibly and effectively. I am particularly interested in opportunities where I can build next-generation AI products, including LLM applications, autonomous agents, multimodal AI, AI infrastructure platforms, and intelligent systems that create measurable impact.

My goal is to continue working on ambitious AI challenges where I can combine research curiosity, engineering execution, and leadership to build scalable AI systems that move from prototypes into reliable products used by real customers.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Member of Technical Staff

Current

OpenAI

Mar 2024 - Present (2 years 6 months)

Led post-training and API model research for frontier foundation models, architected LLM evaluation infrastructure, and contributed to Structured Outputs, o3-mini, and GPT-4.1. Automated benchmark execution and regression analysis, reducing model-validation cycles by approximately 50%.

LLM Post Training API Model Research Reasoning Models Model Evaluation Python JSON schema Function Calling Structured Outputs Benchmarking regression analysis GuardRails Experiment Orchestration

Current

Member of Technical Staff – Foundation Models & AI Systems

Current

OpenAI

Mar 2024 - Present (2 years 6 months)

Led post-training and API model research for frontier foundation models across reasoning, coding, instruction following, and structured/tool-based generation. Architected LLM evaluation infrastructure processing 100K+ benchmark samples and millions of generated tokens, reducing validation cycles by approximately 50%.

LLM Post Training API Model Research Reasoning Models Model Evaluation Structured Outputs Python PyTorch Distributed Systems AI Evaluation GuardRails

Staff Software Engineer – Distributed Systems & Platform Engineering

Stripe

Jul 2023 - Mar 2024 (8 months)

Led technical architecture for high-volume backend services, increasing platform scalability by approximately 35% through service decomposition, workload balancing, and performance engineering. Optimized distributed services across Go, Java, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Kubernetes, raising processing capacity by approximately 30%.

Distributed Systems backend architecture Reliability Engineering Go Java Kafka PostgreSQL Redis Kubernetes Performance Engineering

Staff Software Engineer

Stripe

Jul 2023 - Mar 2024 (8 months)

Led technical architecture for high-volume backend services, increasing platform scalability by approximately 35% through service decomposition and performance engineering. Optimized distributed systems and introduced monitoring and automated recovery mechanisms.

Distributed Systems backend architecture Reliability Engineering Go Java Kafka PostgreSQL Redis Kubernetes Performance Engineering Monitoring Fault Isolation

Senior Software Engineer

Stripe

Jul 2019 - Jun 2023 (3 years 11 months)

Delivered highly available backend services supporting millions of daily payment transactions with 99.99% availability. Increased service throughput by approximately 30% through concurrency optimization and performance tuning, and expanded production observability.

Backend Services APIs Performance Engineering Concurrency Optimization Database Optimization Observability Metrics Logging Distributed Tracing CI CD Testing Automation

Senior Software Engineer – Distributed Backend Systems

Stripe

Jul 2019 - Jun 2023 (3 years 11 months)

Delivered highly available backend services supporting millions of daily payment transactions, maintaining 99.99% availability. Increased service throughput by approximately 30% through concurrency optimization, service decomposition, and performance tuning.

Backend Services APIs Performance Engineering Distributed Systems SQL Caching Observability CI CD

Software Engineer

Stripe

Jul 2017 - Jun 2019 (1 year 11 months)

Implemented backend services and APIs for payment workflows and internal platforms, increasing transaction-processing throughput by approximately 15%. Created reusable service libraries and introduced automated testing and continuous deployment practices.

Backend Development APIs Platform Engineering SQL Database Optimization Caching Testing Automation Continuous Deployment

Software Engineer – Backend Infrastructure

Stripe

Jul 2017 - Jun 2019 (1 year 11 months)

Implemented backend services and APIs for payment workflows and internal platforms, increasing transaction-processing throughput by approximately 15%. Created reusable service libraries and platform components, reducing implementation effort by approximately 20%.

Backend Development APIs Platform Engineering SQL Caching Testing Automation Continuous Deployment

Data Scientist

Luxe

Apr 2015 - Jul 2017 (2 years 3 months)

Developed machine-learning solutions for real-time dispatch and ETA prediction, improving prediction quality and operational efficiency by approximately 20%. Established end-to-end ML workflows and applied statistical modeling to routing and resource allocation.

Machine Learning Real Time Dispatch Predictive ETA Data Preparation Feature Engineering Training Validation Production Integrations Statistical Modeling Optimization

Data Scientist – Machine Learning Systems

Luxe

Apr 2015 - Jul 2017 (2 years 3 months)

Developed machine-learning solutions for real-time dispatch and ETA prediction, improving prediction quality and operational efficiency by approximately 20%. Established end-to-end ML workflows across data preparation, feature engineering, training, validation, and production integration.

Machine Learning Real Time Dispatch Predictive ETA Statistical Modeling Optimization Data Preparation Feature Engineering Model Validation