Currently @ TikTok · Berkeley MEng '27

Hi, I'm

Richard
Cao.

Software Engineer  ·  Builder  ·  Creator

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01. About

Building things that
matter.

I'm a software engineer studying CS at UCLA, with a concentration in mathematics. I work at the intersection of machine learning and real systems — agentic pipelines, mission-critical software, and the infrastructure that ties them together.

Currently building AI validation tooling at TikTok. Heading to UC Berkeley this fall for an MEng in EECS, focused on Data Science & AI.

Languages

PythonTypeScriptJavaC++Go

ML / AI

PyTorchLangChainTransformersLoRA

Backend

FastAPINode.jsMongoDBDocker

Cloud / Tools

AWSGCPGitLinux

02. Projects

Selected
work.

01

AI Validation Pipeline @ TikTok

Internal

AI-powered system that translates Product Requirements into executable test cases, automatically verifying event-tracker correctness across TikTok's ad monetization stack at 1B+ user scale.

PythonAgentic RAGLLMs
02

ELFIN CubeSat — NASA Mission Control

Live

Mission control dashboard and onboard data file system for ELFIN, a NASA space-weather CubeSat. Processed 10M+ telemetry packets during live flight operations.

PythonReactDistributed Systems
03

Modular LoRA Adapters

Research

Trained 7 domain-specific GPT adapters and demonstrated training-free domain fusion via cross-dataset orthogonality, with composed models achieving up to 9.1% lower perplexity. Mentored by Prof. Yingnian Wu at UCLA AI Lab.

PyTorchLoRATransformers
04

AI Quiz Generation Platform

Live

Full-stack platform that generates topic-specific quizzes from user-uploaded PDFs using LangChain retrieval and ChromaDB embeddings, served via Vertex AI.

LangChainChromaDBVertex AI

03. Contact

Let's build something
together.

Currently building at TikTok and headed to Berkeley this fall. Always happy to chat about ML, systems, or whatever you're building.

richardcao789@gmail.com ↗