Software engineer working across backend systems & applied AI.
CS & Math @ Northwestern. Regeneron Science Talent Search Scholar '25. I'm a software engineer who cares most about the parts of a system that keep it correct: queues and workers, idempotent writes, checkpoints that make retries safe, and tests that catch failures before users do.
Most recently I was an AI Agent Intern at ByteDance (Dreamina & CapCut), building data pipelines and scheduled runtimes for the strategy team. Before that I helped build a product from zero at an early-stage startup as one of its first two engineers, owning work from the React frontend to the backend workers and AWS deploys. I also research LLM agent–based search and recommendation at Northwestern's Delta Lab.
In my free time, I photograph sunsets and the Milky Way. Always happy to talk about systems, products, or applied AI. Reach me at forrestchai2029@u.northwestern.edu.
Selected Work
03 projectsByteDance
- AI Agent Intern on the Dreamina & CapCut strategy team.
- Built a stateful workflow runtime with WAL-backed checkpoints and idempotent writes; event recall rose from 32% to 95% with zero duplicates.
- Agent-written briefs went directly to Zhang Nan, former CEO of Douyin Group & ByteDance China, now head of CapCut.
CrowdListen
- #2 Software Engineer, one of two engineers on the product.
- Shipped a full-stack platform where 60–90 second analysis jobs run on Redis-backed queues and horizontally scalable workers across 11 data sources.
- Owned deploys and reliability: Docker on AWS ECS/ECR through GitHub Actions, with integration and load tests for the failures we actually hit.
ScenePrep
- Solo project: an authenticated REST API, a durable PostgreSQL job worker, an installable CLI, and local and remote MCP, all on one set of services.
- Every write takes an idempotency key, revision checks reject stale updates, and row-level security isolates tenants.
- Paid model calls reserve budget in a transaction before dispatch and settle afterward, with no hidden retries.
