Zuo Wang

Staff AI Engineer

amangoworks@gmail.com | +1-757-633-7384
San Diego, US (places I've lived)

Staff-level AI and backend infrastructure engineer with 6 years of experience and over $10M in business impact, working across software and hardware engineering, ML, security, product, and infrastructure.

People leadership: Grew and led a team of 7. Enjoy working with sharp, low-ego engineers.

Interviewing: Have run dozens of algorithm and system-design interviews.

Track record: Consistently ship reliable systems at scale through cross-team work.

Technical Expertise

Languages & Frameworks: Golang, Python, gRPC, GraphQL
Cloud & Infrastructure: GCP, AWS, Kubernetes, Vertex AI
AI / ML: vLLM, Claude, Pinecone, Arize
Data & Observability: MongoDB, Grafana

Work Experience

Samaya AI, London

Member of Technical StaffJan 2024 – Present
  • Built the knowledge ingestion pipeline, chunking and embedding strategy, eval harness, RAG, and the AI infrastructure behind them
  • Took ML ideas from 0 to 1 into shipped features: query decomposition, deep research, and earnings reports
  • Cut time-to-first-token from 100s to 10s (90% faster) and scaled the platform from 10 to 10,000 daily active users
  • Onboarded customers including Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Citi, and Point72, and helped set pricing
  • Built and ran the demo for our $43.5M Series A

Company website

Tesla, Shanghai & Texas Gigafactories

Staff Software Engineer & Team Lead, High Voltage ManufacturingJul 2022 – Jan 2024
  • Owned high-voltage systems across Model 3/Y/S/X, Powerwall, Megapack, and Supercharger
  • Iterated chip designs for Cybertruck and Megapack on a tight 2.5-month deadline
  • Worked closely with vendors worldwide (CATL, BYD, TI, COSMX, HYC, Pegatron, Jabil), traveling on-site for design reviews, inspections, troubleshooting, and bringing down defect rates
  • Trained manufacturing, process, and quality teams to run their own debugging and fault analysis; got the China battery line running 3x faster than the US line
  • Delivered the Cybertruck battery charger 4 weeks ahead of schedule
  • Brought up 50 new manufacturing stations, maintained 200+, and managed a $500k annual budget

Atlassian, Mountain View, CA

Software Engineer, Cloud Security & Platform Infrastructure2018 – Jul 2022 (Remote)
  • Built the auth sidecar securing all traffic between Atlassian microservices and staff
  • Rewrote internal tools (LDAP cache, rate limiter, deduper) from Java, TypeScript, and Python into Go
  • Ran on-call for a 99.99%-availability internal PaaS hosting 1,400+ Atlassian services
  • Built a service generator that scaffolds new services with Kubernetes, SOX compliance, and CI/CD out of the box

Tools: Splunk, SignalFx, Jira, Confluence, AWS S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, Postgres, Spinnaker

Education

Johns Hopkins University

Master of Science, Machine Learning Security | GPA 3.9 / 4.0 | 2018

Coursework: Cloud Security, Software Vulnerability Analysis, Computer Forensics, Network Security, Privacy Laws, Risk Management, Ethical Hacking, Modern Cryptography

University of Rochester

Bachelor of Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering | GPA 3.6 / 4.0 | 2014

Joseph C. Wilson “Change” Scholarship, Dean’s List

Coursework: Signal Processing, Robot Control, Semiconductors, Microprocessors, C++, Java, Assembly, VHDL, MATLAB
Minor: Mathematics and Economics

Projects & Research

Research

Behavioral Biometrics Security Research, Unknot.id

  • Built adversarial attacks against Android behavioral-biometric authentication
  • Showed a shadow-model attack that broke the system in under 1,000 queries
  • Hardened the target LSTM models against those attacks with CleverHans

Published research

Cognitive Security Modeling, Johns Hopkins University

  • Modeled human security decision-making in Python using Instance-Based Learning Theory and ACT-R memory architectures
  • Processed and analyzed 40GB+ of behavioral data to surface security-relevant patterns
  • Worked on an interdisciplinary team bridging computer science and behavioral psychology

Research profile

Technical Projects

Ontra.ai

  • Replaced a thin GPT-wrapper (Ruby on Rails) with a real ML service doing retrieval, cross-encoding, and prompt evaluation
  • Saved lawyers thousands of human-in-the-loop hours previously lost to poor model output

ontra.ai

Agemo Codewords

  • Full-stack web app for automated website building, built with Node.js and shadcn/ui

agemo.ai/codewords

Rippling Global Expansion Framework

  • Built the global-expansion framework for Rippling’s payroll product with Django, MongoDB, and React

LeetCode

  • Solved 1,000+ problems and raised my contest rating from 1460 to 2109 in seven months

leetcode.com/mangoman

Military Drone System, U.S. Army Contract

  • Designed and built a drone-based supply-drop system for Army training exercises
  • Used 3D CAD, additive manufacturing, and Arduino-based controls
  • Fielded at the National Training Center and Joint Readiness Training Center

Battle Map Gaming Platform

  • Real-time multiplayer battle-map platform over WebSockets, with live state sync across players
  • Full-stack and cloud-hosted on Google App Engine

Live demo

Security Research

  • Docker privilege escalation: used the Dirty COW race condition for container-to-host escape
  • IoT exploitation: network analysis and attacks on DJI and Bebop drones and Amazon Echo
  • Malicious URL detection: ML models on the PhishTank and DMOZ datasets, evaluated with ROC curves
  • Software vulnerability analysis: threat modeling and reverse engineering with objdump, ldd, nm, and strace
  • CryptoDoneRight: contributed server-hardening tools to cryptodoneright.org

Interests

Gaming: built a gaming platform; top 0.3% League of Legends player
Music: guitarist with live concert experience; university carillon society
Athletics: stand-up paddleboarding, amateur boxing, 10+ pull-ups
Hardware: headphone amplifier, windshield-wiper controller, custom PC builds