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
ML / AI
Backend
Cloud / Tools
02. Projects
Selected work.
→ All projectsTrustZone IPC Library @ Qualcomm
Internal2026Low-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.
AI Knowledge Retrieval @ TikTok
Internal2026Rule-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.
ELFIN CubeSat — NASA Mission Control
Live2025Mission control dashboard and onboard data file system for ELFIN, a NASA space-weather CubeSat. Processed 10M+ telemetry packets during live flight operations.
Modular LoRA Adapters
Research2024 – 25Parameter-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.
AI Quiz Generation Platform
Live2024Full-stack platform that generates topic-specific quizzes from user-uploaded PDFs using LangChain retrieval and ChromaDB embeddings, served via Vertex AI.
03. Live
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04. Connect
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