# Qiang Zhang

Qiang Zhang is a remote worker on Himalayas, Member of Technical Staff – Foundation Models & AI Systems at OpenAI, based in United States.

Source: https://himalayas.app/@qiangzhang

```text
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
```

| Detail | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Availability | Open to opportunities |
| Location | United States |
| Authorized to work in | United States |
| Salary expectations | 160k-300k USD |
| Job categories | Artificial Intelligence Developer, Staff Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer, Software Engineer, Data Scientist |
| Skills | Python, SQL, AWS, CI CD, Foundation Models, Large Language Models, LLM Post Training, Model Evaluation, Evaluation Pipelines, Structured Outputs, Reasoning Models, Supervised FineTuning, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, Instruction Tuning, Incentive Modeling, Model Alignment, AI Guardrails, Benchmarking, Distributed Systems |
| LinkedIn | https://https://linkedin.com/in/brian-zq/ |
| GitHub | https://https://github.com/brianzq/ |

## What I'm looking for

```text
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.
```

## About

```text
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

### Member of Technical Staff – Foundation Models & AI Systems (current)

[OpenAI](https://himalayas.app/companies/openai). Mar 2024 - Present

```text
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%.
```

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

### Member of Technical Staff (current)

[OpenAI](https://himalayas.app/companies/openai). Mar 2024 - Present

```text
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%.
```

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

### Staff Software Engineer – Distributed Systems & Platform Engineering

[Stripe](https://himalayas.app/companies/stripe). Jul 2023 - Mar 2024

```text
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%.
```

Skills: Distributed-Systems, backend-architecture, Reliability-Engineering, Go, Java, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kubernetes, Performance-Engineering

### Staff Software Engineer

[Stripe](https://himalayas.app/companies/stripe). Jul 2023 - Mar 2024

```text
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.
```

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

### Senior Software Engineer – Distributed Backend Systems

[Stripe](https://himalayas.app/companies/stripe). Jul 2019 - Jun 2023

```text
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.
```

Skills: Backend-Services, APIs, Performance-Engineering, Distributed-Systems, SQL, Caching, Observability, CI-CD

### Senior Software Engineer

[Stripe](https://himalayas.app/companies/stripe). Jul 2019 - Jun 2023

```text
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.
```

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

### Software Engineer – Backend Infrastructure

[Stripe](https://himalayas.app/companies/stripe). Jul 2017 - Jun 2019

```text
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%.
```

Skills: Backend-Development, APIs, Platform-Engineering, SQL, Caching, Testing-Automation, Continuous-Deployment

### Software Engineer

[Stripe](https://himalayas.app/companies/stripe). Jul 2017 - Jun 2019

```text
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.
```

Skills: Backend-Development, APIs, Platform-Engineering, SQL, Database-Optimization, Caching, Testing-Automation, Continuous-Deployment

### Data Scientist

Luxe. Apr 2015 - Jul 2017

```text
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.
```

Skills: 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

```text
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.
```

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

## Education

### University of California, Los Angeles

Master's Degree, Statistics. 2013 - 2015

```text
Pursued a Master's Degree in Statistics, focusing on advanced statistical methods and data analysis.
```

### Nankai University

Bachelor's degree, Math & Statistics. 2009 - 2013

```text
Earned a Bachelor's degree in Math & Statistics, building a strong foundation in mathematical theory and statistical applications.
```

## Tech stack

- AWS Amplify
- Apache Spark
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud Platform
- Kubernetes
- Azure Kubernetes Service
- NumPy
- Pandas
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- Node.js
- Google Analytics
- Databricks
- OpenCV
- Redis
- Terraform
- AWS CloudFormation
- AWS Cloud Development Kit
- Pulumi
- Azure DevOps
- React
- JavaScript
- Python
- Java
- C#
- Go
- C++
- Rust
- TensorFlow
- PyTorch
- MLflow
- scikit-learn
- Keras
- Kubeflow
- Kafka
- gRPC
- AWS Lambda
- Azure SQL Database
- Google Cloud SQL
- TypeScript
- Docker
- Airflow
- CUDA
- SQL
- Azure Cosmos DB
- XGBoost
- SciPy
- LightGBM
- Weights & Biases
- vLLM
- JAX
- ONNX Runtime
- Bash

To contact Qiang, message them from this profile with a Himalayas employer account: [Hire on Himalayas](https://himalayas.app/hire).

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