Chase Ziwen Cao

Software Engineer

San Mateo, California, United States10 yrs 2 mos experience

Highly StableAI Enabled

Key Highlights

10+ years of experience in AI infrastructure.
Expert in optimizing large model inference.
Proven track record at industry giants.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Backend-heavy AI Infrastructure Engineer specializing in large model optimization.

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Skills

Core Skills

Model InferenceFoundation ModelReinforcement LearningGenerative AiNatural Language Processing (nlp)Java

Other Skills

PretrainingPython (Programming Language)Transformer ModelsVariational Autoencoders (VAEs)Diffusion ModelRLHFSFTGenerative Adversarial Networks (GANs)DPOPPOTensorFlowLarge Language Models (LLM)Software InfrastructureScalabilityPyTorch

About

Backend veteran turned AI infrastructure builder. With 10+ years at industry giants like TikTok, Meta, and Airbnb, I now focus on making Foundation Models run fast and efficiently.

Experience

10 yrs 2 mos

Total Experience

3 yrs 3 mos

Average Tenure

5 mos

Current Experience

Tiktok

Staff Software Engineer

Jan 2026 – Present · 5 mos · San Francisco Bay Area · On-site

Large Model Inference Infra & Optimization — making Large Models run fast and efficiently.

model inferenceFoundation ModelPretrainingPython (Programming Language)Transformer ModelsVariational Autoencoders (VAEs)+14

Stanford online

AI Professional Certificate (Stanford Online)

Jan 2025 – Aug 2025 · 7 mos · Stanford, California, United States · Remote

Completed an intensive, graduate-level AI curriculum (Stanford Online) focused on NLP, Reinforcement Learning, and Deep Generative Models; earned the AI Professional Certificate.
Built hands-on Python/PyTorch projects with from-scratch implementations, reproducible experiments, and structured evaluation/write-ups.
Coverage highlights:
NLP/LLMs: embeddings → RNNs/attention → Transformers & pretraining; decoding/training objectives; evaluation & error analysis.
RL (incl. RLHF/DPO concepts): MDPs, planning, policy optimization, offline RL; exploration vs. data efficiency trade-offs.
Generative Modeling: autoregressive models, VAEs, GANs, diffusion/score-based methods; likelihood vs. sample-quality evaluation.

PyTorchPython (Programming Language)Transformer ModelsLarge Language Models (LLM)Reinforcement LearningVariational Autoencoders (VAEs)+7

Airbnb

2 roles

Senior Software Engineer

Promoted

Dec 2019 – Mar 2024 · 4 yrs 3 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

LLM generative AI for customer service chatbots and agents

Reinforcement LearningSearch AdvertisingApache SparkSearchGitMapReduce+14

Software Engineer

Apr 2017 – Dec 2019 · 2 yrs 8 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• Specialized in Search backend, Ads backend, Recommendation system and Infrastructure

Reinforcement LearningNatural Language Processing (NLP)

Zenefits

Full Stack Software Engineer

Feb 2016 – Apr 2017 · 1 yr 2 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

Collaborated on an internal platform for life and disability insurance, expanding service to over 100,000 customers.
Contributed to significant revenue growth through the cloud-based human resources platform.

Java