currently @ UCLA·Los Angeles, CA·Berkeley EECS '28
Hi, I'm
Richard
Cao.

Software Engineer  ·  Builder  ·  Creator

richardcao789@gmail.com

01. About

Building things that
matter.

CS @ UCLA, then EECS MEng @ Berkeley in 2027. I work at the intersection of ML and real systems — low-level IPC on Snapdragon, agentic pipelines, mission-critical satellite software, and the infra that ties them together.

Open to SWE, MLE, and research opportunities. Reach out ↓

Education

  • '28

    UC Berkeley · M.Eng EECS — AI focus

  • '27

    UCLA · B.S. CS — Math concentration · 3.94 GPA

Experience

  • '26

    Qualcomm · System SWE — TrustZone IPC for ARM

  • '26

    TikTok · SWE — AI knowledge retrieval + MCP

  • '25

    NASA ELFIN CubeSat · SWE — satellite mission control

  • '24

    UCLA AI Lab · Research — modular LoRA fusion

Languages

PythonC++CJavaGoJavaScript

ML / AI

PyTorchTransformersPEFT / LoRALangChainMCP

Backend

FastAPIFlaskReactSQLMongoDB

Cloud / Tools

DockerCI/CDAWSGCPLinux

02. Projects

Selected work.

→ All projects
01

TrustZone IPC Library @ Qualcomm

Internal2026

Low-latency, cross-address-space IPC library for ARM that lets Linux processes invoke TrustZone secure services without managing shared memory. Built the transport core (call marshalling, parking/waking over a non-blocking transport, callbacks by reference) behind a socket-like client interface adopted by 5 partner teams.

CC++ARM TrustZoneLinux / Android
02

AI Knowledge Retrieval @ TikTok

Internal2026

Rule-driven knowledge retrieval service where AI applies defined rules to surface supporting evidence — a centralized source of truth for company data. Packaged it as reusable Skills, a CLI, and MCP servers, cut load and query latency ~40%, and built an agent pipeline that generates tracking test cases from PRDs at ~80% of manual coverage.

PythonMCPAgentsMongoDB
03

ELFIN CubeSat — NASA Mission Control

Live2025

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
04

Modular LoRA Adapters

Research2024 – 25

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning infrastructure using LoRA: trained 7 domain-specific LLM adapters and demonstrated training-free multi-model fusion via subspace orthogonality, with composed models achieving up to 9.1% lower perplexity. Mentored by Prof. Yingnian Wu at UCLA AI Lab.

PyTorchLoRATransformers
05

AI Quiz Generation Platform

Live2024

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

LangChainChromaDBVertex AI
06

Cactus Reading

High School2023

Chrome extension that detects difficult words and shows hover definitions, with a customizable word bank. Built in HS to read philosophy faster; became a first-author NLP paper at AIRCC CSIT.

Chrome ExtFirebaseNLP

03. Live

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04. Connect

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