Hi there 👋, I'm Stuart. I aim to be both an entrepreneur and a dedicated computer engineer. I'm passionate about developing new products, optimizing complex systems, learning new technologies, and building a great team. I love the feeling of tackling novel challenges from scratch and pushing the boundaries of what's possible in computer science. I co-founded Blux (formerly Z.Ai), an AI startup specializing in empowering e-commerce and online content platforms through AI-driven personalization. Blux raised $1.7M+ USD from SpringCamp and Primer Sazze, and personalized over 10 million Korean users' online journeys monthly. Leading Blux was an exciting journey building robust and scalable ML systems and dedicating myself to effectively leading and growing our engineering team. Currently, I work as the DevOps & MLOps Lead at Linq (Techstars '23), focusing on developing efficient software architectures for operating Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) products designed for professional services firms. I will also be starting my Master of Science degree in Computer Science (MSCS) at Stanford University in Fall 2024. In addition, I'm a musician, a guitarist, and a composer with two publicly released albums. I've been a lead guitarist and producer in various rock bands since 2008. I'm always up for a conversation about rock music and audio. Feel free to connect with me via my email or LinkedIn 😁
Education
Stanford University
M.S. in Computer Science
- Incoming student, Fall 2024
Seoul National University
B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering
- GPA: 4.21/4.3 (Class Rank: 1st)
Experience
Linq (Techstars '23)
DevOps & MLOps Lead
- Currently engineering a resilient multi-cloud RAG architecture across AWS and Azure.
- Migrated all application workloads to a K8s environment and implemented IaC for existing cloud resources.
- Established core DevOps practices, including GitOps, autoscaling, CI/CD, monitoring, logging, and alarming, with Argo CD, Karpenter, GitHub Actions, Elasticsearch, Fluentbit, Kibana, Prometheus, and Grafana.
Blux (formerly Z.Ai)
Co-Founder and CTO
- Co-founded and grew Blux to serve 10M+ users monthly with $1M+ in annual revenue.
- Designed a K8s-based recommender architecture that handled 1B+ requests monthly and trained/deployed 100+ recommender models (featured in the official AWS Blog).
- Maintained 99.95%+ service uptime since the initial product launch.
- Developed and documented the Blux SDK.
- Built Transformer-based recommender recommender models that led initial customers to switch from a comparable AWS product to Blux.
- Initiated and managed multiple engineering projects, including ECS -> K8s migration, Cafe24 (Korean Shopify) product launch, and tenant onboarding automation.
- Recruited, built, and led a team of 10+ highly skilled engineers.
- Blux is an AI startup specializing in real-time recommender systems for e-commerce; it secured $1.7M in funding and received a $10M valuation in Korea.
Architecture and Code Optimization Lab
Research Assistant (Advisor: Prof. Jae W. Lee)
- Designed and implemented a novel embedding clustering algorithm in C++, reducing the main memory access by up to 44% in commercial deep learning recommendation models (DLRMs).
- Co-authored an academic paper accepted at a top-tier CS conference (ASPLOS '21).
- Performed support tasks including data preprocessing, analysis, and algorithmic prototyping in C++ and Python.
Projects
SampyoNet
University Team Project
- Developed a deep learning model and a mobile application for automated gravel quality assessment in concrete manufacturing.
- The project was requested by Sampyo, a leading cement manufacturer in South Korea.
LLVM Compiler Optimization
University Team Project
- Engineered a custom LLVM compiler for optimized assembly code performance.
- Secured 2nd place among 13 teams in a university competition.
Homemade Neural Network
Personal Project
- A deep learning framework written using only native Python (not even NumPy).
Skills
Languages
English & Korean
Programming Languages
Python, Java, C, C++, JavaScript/TypeScript, HTML/CSS, SQL
Libraries & Frameworks
React.js, FastAPI, Flask, Redis, PostgreSQL, NumPy, Pandas, Tensorflow
DevOps & MLOps
Linux Administration, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, AWS (VPC, EC2, ECS, EKS, EBS, ELB, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Lambda, API Gateway, SMS, SNS, SQS, Glue, MWAA, Route53, CloudFront, CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CloudFormation, Secrets Manager, KMS, CloudWatch, CloudTrail), Azure, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Argo CD, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Fluentbit, Kibana, Prometheus, Loki, Grafana, Apache Airflow, MLflow, TensorFlow Serving, Karpenter, Sealed Secrets
*I operated all of these at the production level*
More About Me
Music
I am a guitarist and composer with 2 albums released on major streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. Since 2008, I have served as the lead guitarist for various rock bands, performing in 2~3 rock concerts every year before COVID-19.
U.S. Army
I served as a Combat Medic in a U.S. Army cavalry unit from November 2017 to August 2019. This was possible through the Korean Augmentation to the United States Army (KATUSA) program, which allowed me to fulfill South Korea's military service requirement while serving in the U.S. Army.