Jul 2025 – Present
NAVSYS Corporation is a small but well established (40+ years) defense company that specializes in making navigation systems. Our mission is to serve as a backup to GPS, which is important in places where GPS is jammed, such as conflict areas. We are the leading company in this space, and the technology is in great demand. It is rewarding to be doing impactful work developing a needed product.
I primarily work with C++ and MATLAB for this role. My duties mainly include analyzing data collected from tests, which includes communicating results, generating visuals, and tweaking configurations to see if there could've been improvements, as well as bug fixing and adding to our code base.
Apr 2025 – Jul 2025
I was employed as a contractor for Globe Life selling life insurance products. I passed the California Life, Accident, and Health Exam to obtain my license. This was a full-time, remote, contractor role where I managed the entire sales cycle from making first contact with the customer to closing the sale and filing the policy application.
I learned some insurance industry basics through the exam process, and I gained a deep understanding of the various types of life insurance through the sales role. I kept my own book of business and maintained a document with details about clients and referrals.
Jan 2025 – Jul 2025
My job here was to be the "human" in RLHF — reinforcement learning from human feedback. The task was to manually review prompt + response pairs from LLMs, specifically for programming prompts, and provide feedback which was then sent back to top AI labs for them to use to train their models. This would include grading the quality and accuracy of the LLM response, correcting the LLM response, and most interestingly, creating rubrics for what I'd consider to be an optimal LLM response.
It was very cool work, and it is very cool that I have already had a hand in the process of building LLMs. However, this was incredibly demanding work. I'd have to be very meticulous about giving correct information, meeting all demands of the contract, even proper English writing. There were times I wrote tasks for programming languages I had never even heard of, but by being a resourceful software engineer, I was able to reason through the prompt, do the necessary research, and note inaccuracies in the LLM response.
I was promoted multiple times all the way to Team Lead, where I would provide the final layer of review before the training data is shipped to the customer. I would also provide guidance to the other software engineers.
June 2024 – Dec 2024
I took some time post-grad to take a break from technical work to work with my hands and learn about common home construction work. This included painting, laying concrete, drywall, laying tile, weatherproofing, plumbing, installing fixtures, and more. I'd like to think I improved my fine motor skills. And it was great to spend so much time with my cousin Mikey!
May 2023 – August 2023
My dad taught me poker when I was four, and I've enjoyed the game ever since. As such, it just took a couple training sessions with a friend who's a dealer to pass an audition at Hollywood Park. I was quickly put on the graveyard shift for cash games, which was a step up from daytime dealing or tournament dealing. Important skills here were having quick mental math and ensuring customer satisfaction. To my personal benefit, I also got to spend a lot of time trying to figure out people's tells (body language, behavior, etc. giving clues about the strength of a player's hand). Even though poker game theory has gotten so developed, I still think there is tremendous value by paying attention to tells.
January 2023 – May 2024
CSCI 356: Introduction to Computer Systems deals with low-level programming, like assembly and C, and covers topics like hacking, caching, and virtual memory. I earned an A in the course and worked ~8-hour weeks as a course producer for the next three semesters, where I held office hours and made sure to stay quick with the lecture material and homeworks.
I also took initiative to create learning guides for each of the five assignments, and you can find PDFs of those guides here. I was happy to find out they were reused for Fall 2025! I really enjoyed the material, as it was super technical and logical. And I really, really (x10) enjoyed working with the students and Dr. Paolieri.
May 2022 – August 2022
I was a teacher at a USC summer program CS@SC for eight 40-hour weeks, and I rotated through topics including Python, HTML/CSS, and robotics. Ages ranged 5–18, and I taught the whole range.
USC gives scholarships to most students, too, as it’s targeted toward girls and low-income students. It’s a great program, you can find their home page here.
May 2018 – August 2018, May 2019 – August 2019
I was a researcher for two summers at ASU’s Applied Math REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates). Each time, I was paired with a few other students and we were mentored by Dr. Platte. In both summers, my work fell under the broad umbrella of approximation theory.
Please go to my GitHub repo here to find pictures, MATLAB code, and short descriptions of the projects. For each of the 2018 and 2019 programs, we wrote reports to the National Science Foundation to justify funding, gave midterm presentations, and gave final presentations.
Before that...
In high school, I worked at Mathnasium my junior year and did private tutoring my senior year. I also refereed youth basketball games.