Industry

Software Engineer @ Snowflake

At Snowflake, I am currently working on the Trust Center Platform.

Software Engineer Intern @ Amazon

At Amazon, I experienced a challenging yet rewarding task in system design. I built a user-facing reporting feature for the Explore with Alexa service. The project was large enough for me to discuss multiple design options in both the data gathering and data processing steps. I outlined major tradeoffs between processing data at event time, asynchronously, and at report time, and presented them to the team. For the implementation, the Alexa infrastructure builds on top of LLMs, meaning that while processing capabilities can be powerful, careful prompt engineering is required for the model to perform as expected. Finally, the project was a great learning opportunity in AWS services, where I used CloudFront, DynamoDB, and S3 for the service itself, and CloudWatch, Lambda, and CloudFormation for deployment.

Software Engineer Intern @ Snowflake

In this second internship at Snowflake, I have gained a strong understanding of how teams need to move quickly. It is imperative that we measure the tradeoffs between different designs and pursue the choice that will have a maximal impact with the most manageable allocation of resources. On the technical side, this experience was eye-opening to appreciate the inner workings of a SQL optimizer in a large database engineering team. It was valuable to understand the challenges and strong observability required to measured the effewhen rcts of rolling out new features that could greatly impact customer query performance in production.

Software Engineer Intern @ Snowflake

At Snowflake, I gained many technical and soft skills. On the technical side, I learned how to write design docs and translate system calls for resource usage into visualized observability metrics. More importantly, I learned valuable professional skills like taking ownership of my project, reaching out frequently to multiple members of the team for guidance and feedback, and communicating effectively with the team. This experience was a valuable insight into the tech industry, and confirmed my passion for work on meaningful projects using my technical skills.

Computational Science Intern @ PNNL

At the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), I learned to build a battery cathode model simulation at a customer-facing level. I worked closely with the research team, holding frequent meetings to understand the usage of our model, and learned the importance of ensuring full understanding of the specifications. By building a model of the chemical process that the research team could then use as an heuristic for the ratios of materials used in the lab obtaining maximal conductance, the team could save many physical resources. This direct impact of my work invoked my passion for building things with meaningful impact.

Intern @ Goodwell Technologies

As a high school intern at Goodwell Technologies, I was welcomed into the industry, especially gaining experience working at a small company and startup-like culture. This major learning experience helped shaped my interests in technology and business, and helped me better understand the indstury, including the importance of business strategy, web security, and accessiblity.

Teaching

Teaching Assistant @ University of Washington

At the University of Washington Paul G. Allen School (UW CSE), I have been a teaching assistant for CSE 312 (Probability and Statistics) for 5 quarters and CSE 421 (Algorithms) for 2 quarters. I feel that I have gained significant technical and problem solving skills as I learn to not only understand the content, but also how to effectively communicate how students can approach probability problems and design algorithms. Additionally, I have gained valuable soft skills, where I am required to practice effective communication while leading weekly discussion sections, hosting weekly office hours, and answering questions on the question board.

Volunteer Tutor @ Little Master’s Club

Throughout high school, I was a volunteer tutor at the Little Master’s Club who taught English to elementary and middle schoolers in China. I was motivated to understand what the students wanted to get out of our time and consequently tailored reading material that aligned with the students’ interests. As a result, I believe that my passion for teaching stemmed from this direct impact I had on the students’ learning.