Eric Zhu
Sydney/Aus
00About
Result-driven software engineer and artist with expertise in using Python, Java, and TypeScript to build large distributed systems for B2B applications. Currently pursuing a Master of IT at UNSW, specialising in Artificial Intelligence, and actively developing NotesCast, a platform utilising LLMs and STT models to enhance knowledge discovery and curation through podcasts. Also expanding knowledge through books and podcasts on technology, philosophy, design, and investment strategies.
01Education
University of New South Wales
Master of Science, Information Technology (Artificial Intelligence)
WAM: 81
Relevant courses: Computer Graphics, Computer Networks and Applications, Information Retrieval and Web Search
University of New South Wales
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence)
Relevant courses: Database Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Business Finance, Portfolio Management, Neural Networks & Deep Learning, Cryptocurrency and DLT, Computer Vision, Recommender Systems, Knowledge Representation
02Professional Experience
Amazon Web Services
Cloud Support Eng. I (SVO)
Fulltime
- Providing support for customers building on SageMaker and Bedrock
NotesCast
Software Engineer
Founder
- Automatic Speech Recognition STT models and LLMs are used alongside various prompting techniques, such as Chain-of-Density, to transform podcast audio files into summaries
- Generated data is embedded in sliding windows to power Alexandria, a Retrieval Augmented Generation agent that allows users to query for industry-specific knowledge, as well as a recommendation engine for users to discover related content
- User authentication is handled via Firebase, while the other server features including RAG is deployed to AWS EC2
- v0.1 launched in Dec 2023 with roughly 300 MAUs, and currently working on improving summary text quality and response accuracy for Alexandria for a v1 release
- Currently building a pipeline for speaker diarization and speaker-specific retrieval
National Australia Bank
Software Engineer Intern
Fulltime
- Delivered robust features for the New Payments Platform using Java, Spring, and Jenkins on AWS in an Agile environment
- Led the implementation of PayID transaction processing feature after analyzing customer payment pain points, resulting in faster payment processing and projected revenue impact of 3-5M/year
- Explored and mastered new monitoring tools to better understand system performance, leading to the identification and resolution of transaction dropping issues during high-traffic periods
- Investigated and resolved a critical Kafka backpressure performance issue by diving deep into system metrics and logs, ensuring reliable payment processing for customers during peak loads of 5,000 transactions/second
- Enhanced CI/CD pipelines using Python, Jenkins, and Terraform, increasing QA efficiency by 8%
- Proactively learned and implemented multiple AWS services and Spring framework features to enhance the New Payments Platform, demonstrating adaptability in a complex financial technology stack
The University of Sydney
Research Engineer, Life and Environmental Sciences
Project-based
- Developed a Fast Low-cost Online Semantic Segmentation machine learning model for detecting abnormal contextual changes in streaming data from sensors placed around a building
- Responsible for designing and implementing a website using Gatsby and Contentful CMS for the research project
MAPFRE Insurance
Software Engineer Intern
Fulltime
- Collaborated with a senior engineer to develop a new mobile app using Vue.js and Node using REST APIs
- Engineered a new routing algorithm, which led to an 18% reduction in incident response time
03Works
- The famous gravity-based game: Flappy Birdddddd
- Convert text from books and articles into vector embeddings
- Exploring how to interact and visualise embedding maps
- Create dot patterns, ASCII art, and Gaussian blurs from images
- Pick a primary colour and generate a palette from an image
- Faithful implementations of models using original papers
- AlexNet and VGG-16 complete
- Currently working on ResNet50 and a ResNet-based GAN
- Each app/window is a portal into a different perspective of website design
04Certifications & Awards
05Interests
Books
Reading is an intimate act where your mind interacts with the author. To some extent, the author gains control over parts of your mind as you seek to understand the text and the author's thoughts.
I've recently read:
You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For
Mar 2025Richard C. Schwartz
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Dec 2024Stephen R. Covey
Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience
Sep 2024Matthew Ratcliffe
Podcasts
The best way to get unfiltered insights from business, technology, and finance leaders. There's this sense of intimacy that you don't often get from other forms of media excluding books.