currently @ TikTok·Los Angeles → SJ·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 — agentic pipelines, mission-critical software, and the infra that ties them together.

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

Education

  • '28

    UC Berkeley · M.Eng EECS — Data Science & AI

  • '27

    UCLA · B.S. CS — Math concentration

Experience

  • '26

    TikTok · AI agent + knowledge base dev

  • '26

    Qualcomm · System SWE on IPC

  • '25

    NASA ELFIN CubeSat · Mission control system dev

  • '24

    UCLA AI Lab · LoRA for modular learning

Languages

PythonTypeScriptJavaC++Go

ML / AI

PyTorchLangChainTransformersLoRA

Backend

FastAPINode.jsMongoDBDocker

Cloud / Tools

AWSGCPGitLinux

02. Projects

Selected work.

→ All projects
01

AI Validation Pipeline @ TikTok

Internal2026

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

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
03

Modular LoRA Adapters

Research2024 – 25

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

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
05

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

rc community

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04. Connect

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