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Resume

Education

University of Pennsylvania

Master of Science in Engineering in Computer and Information Science

August 2023 — May 2025

  • ‣ GPA: 3.90/4.0
  • ‣ Philadelphia, PA

Rice University

Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science

August 2019 — May 2023

  • ‣ Houston, TX

Experience

Software Engineer

HeartByte Inc | YC Startup for Gen-AI Interactive Story

June 2025 — Present

  • ‣ Built a Gen-AI interactive story web app using React, Next.js, and Firebase serving 10K+ users monthly.
  • ‣ Designed and implemented a production-grade branching visual-novel engine enabling choice-driven narratives, manual and auto save/restore flows, and clean authoring experience, boosted playability for 1k+ stories.
  • ‣ Re-architected 10+ core pages end-to-end with UI revamp, client-side-to-server-side rendering migration, API/data fetching redesign, and database schema redesign, improved usability, efficiency, and core web vitals by 20%.
  • ‣ Designed a numeric stats system personal to each user within each novel for branching logic that enables conditional branching and conditional novel endings, enabling authors to personalize their stories creatively.
  • ‣ Shipped an LLM story-generation pipeline (Groq + prompt engineering) with few-shot examples and JSON schema validation/repair for hallucination prevention; integrated into a multi-step story authoring flow.

Software Engineer Intern

HeartByte Inc | San Francisco CA (Remote)

May 2024 — Aug 2024; Jan 2025 — May 2025

  • ‣ Spearheaded comprehensive Search Engine Optimization (SEO) initiatives, including structured metadata, improved site performance, and keyword targeting, to enhance online visibility and increase organic traffic by 5X.
  • ‣ Developed 10+ full-stack features including story recommendation using TypeScript, React.js, Firebase and Next.js, enhancing product functionality to improve user experience and boost product completeness.
  • ‣ Streamlined and standardized website UI of 15+ pages by standardizing CSS and styling using Tailwind CSS and NextUI components, reducing design inconsistencies and accelerating the development process.

Software Engineer

YelpScout | University of Pennsylvania

Jan 2024 — May 2024

  • ‣ Engineered a local business search & insights web app using React, Node/Express, and MySQL with advanced search filters, single-business analytics pages, and personalized recommendations in a 4-person team.
  • ‣ Designed and implemented the single-business analytics page for 150K+ businesses with weekday popularity, ratings, reservation flag, and customer review keyword extraction powered by RAKE-NLTK preprocessing.
  • ‣ Optimized performance via indexes and cached/intermediate tables, reducing heavy queries from minutes to 1–3s.

Software Engineer

DocSearch | University of Pennsylvania

Sep 2023 — Dec 2023

  • ‣ Built an end-to-end search engine (crawler, distributed KVS, indexer, ranking, web UI, EC2) in a 4-person team.
  • ‣ Implemented a robust and efficient distributed key-value store in Java with concurrent processing and stream-put to store crawl/index/PageRank tables; crawled 400K+ pages and stored information in the KVS.
  • ‣ Engineered the pipeline, including crawling, precomputed TF-IDF + PageRank, ranking, and web deployment.
  • ‣ Implemented crawl frontier policies: allowlist-based token filtering with title-term expansion, depth/size guards and error filtering, and per-domain quotas to boost crawl efficiency and downstream relevance.

Skills

Programming & Software Design

Python, Java, C, C++, SQL, Object-Oriented Programming, RESTful API

Web Dev

HTML, JavaScript/TypeScript, CSS, React, Node.js, Express.js, Next.js, Tailwind, HeroUI, Figma, Vercel

Cloud

GCP, AWS, Firestore, EC2, S3

Machine Learning & AI

ChatGPT, LangChain, PyTorch, Groq, Prompt Engineering, MCP

Tools & Data

GitHub, LaTeX, Firebase, Jest, JUnit, Cypress, Pandas, MongoDB, MySQL, Oracle, Neo4j

Built by Lionel Hu