Vetted Teaching Assistants in New York

Zhiwen Zhao

Screened

Junior Data Engineer specializing in cloud ETL and big data platforms

New York, NY3y exp

“Data engineer focused on transit/transportation datasets, building Spark-based pipelines that ingest from Oracle/APIs, apply PySpark data-quality fixes, and publish star-schema fact tables to Azure Data Lake. Experienced troubleshooting complex Spark failures (using checkpointing to manage long lineage) and operating Airflow-driven backfills and GitLab CI deployments for production DAGs.”

“Founding engineer at Novum AI building a real-time call analytics/suggestion backend (transcription + sentiment/tone + context retrieval) using a serverless architecture. Drove major latency improvements (about 4s down to sub-1.5s) and has practical experience hardening production APIs (FastAPI/Pydantic, auth with Cognito/Redis) and payment systems (Stripe) by surfacing overlooked subscription and multi-tenant billing edge cases.”

“Cross-functional operator at Andium who led founder-level initiatives spanning next-gen product launch + legacy sunset, built decision-driven operating cadences (dashboards, memos, blocker tracking), and drove international expansion after a Series B led by Saudi Aramco. Also supported a $6M strategic opportunity in Australia by coordinating pricing, product feedback loops, and internal alignment across an AI-enabled SaaS + hardware business.”

“UE5 gameplay scripter who built a player-facing skill tree for a third-person shooter end-to-end (icons in Illustrator, UI animations, Blueprint behaviors, HLSL shader effects) and migrated the system from Data Assets to Data Tables to improve maintainability and designer-friendly balancing. Also implemented modular weapon logic via base classes, playtest-driven tuning, and refactored broken UI flows into a centralized UI manager with QA-focused debug unlock flags.”

“Robotics/perception engineer who led and owned ARC, a cooperative perception system for autonomous vehicles that aligns and fuses multi-vehicle LiDAR point clouds in real time. Built a ROS-based multi-node pipeline with grid-based spatial reasoning and motion-compensated data sharing, achieving <20 ms compute latency and sub-7 cm alignment error; accepted to ACM SenSys 2026.”

“Backend/AI engineer who has shipped production LLM systems end-to-end, including an AI request-routing service (FastAPI + BART MNLI + OpenAI/Gemini) that improved accuracy ~25% after launch via eval-driven prompt/category iteration. Also built an enterprise document intelligence/RAG platform on Azure (Blob/SharePoint/Teams ingestion, OCR/NLP chunking, embeddings in Azure Cognitive Search) with PII guardrails (Presidio), confidence gating, and scalable event-driven pipelines handling millions of documents.”