Work Experience
TF Lead, Search Agent TF Present
Making sure LLM has the context at the right timing (Concurrent role with AI Alignment Team Lead). Reporting directly to CEO, Shina Chung.
Team Lead, AI Alignment Present
Leading full-stack LLM research covering continuous pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and inference optimization. Hands-on experience training and serving models from 8B-600B+ parameters for server deployment and sub-4B models for on-device applications. Successfully launched 11 Generative AI services including AI Shopping Mate, AI Local Mate, and Kakaoshoppinglive AI, serving millions of users.
Part Lead, Generative AI
Led company-wide LLM strategy PoC, developing a summarization model achieving 80.3% performance parity with ChatGPT using a small-sized open-source LLM. Delivered 7 production-ready demos in 3 months, including Korea's first AI baseball chatbot service.
Cell Lead, Recommendation
Served as Technical Lead for KakaoTalk's largest gift service renovation (MAU 26M), implementing product and price range recommendations with explanation generation, driving 10.5% of Gift's $2.7B revenue. Led the first deep learning recommendation model development across 7 major services, achieving record-breaking improvements.
Research Engineer
Developed and deployed a fully customized, transformer-based product categorization model for 100M+ e-commerce items, achieving 10x faster training than Google BERT and improving F0.5 score by +2%p.
Co-Founder, Business Strategy
Co-founded a mobile health app, growing the user base from 1,000 to 50,000 in 3 months and securing over $100,000 in NY-based VC and ROK government funding.
Publications & Patents
ACL 2025: A Practical Approach for Building Production-Grade Conversational Agents
Corresponding author and Technical Lead for a paper accepted to the ACL 2025 Industry Track.
Method, Server and User Terminal for Product Recommendation (2 Patents)
Filed in KR, US, and JP (2023). Covers novel methods for providing personalized product recommendations.
KDD Cup 2022: Predicting Query-Item Relationship using Adversarial Training
Co-authored paper on robust modeling techniques, presented at the KDD Cup 2022 Workshop.
if(kakao) 2021: Building a BERT Model 10x Faster than Google
Presented techniques for building a highly efficient and accurate BERT-like model at a major tech conference.
Awards
Kaggle Competitions Expert 2023
Top 0.5% Globally. 2x Silver Medals in Stable Diffusion & Age-Related Conditions competitions.
NeurIPS IGLU Challenge 2022
6th Place out of 54 teams in the NLP Task.
Amazon KDD Cup 2022
Top 10 Winner out of 273 teams in Product Substitution Classification (NLP).
DACON & National AI Competitions 2020 - 2021
Multiple 2nd place finishes in NLP, Vision, and Financial Volatility Prediction tasks.
In The Media
Featured in JoongAng Ilbo
Discussed the development and launch of Kakao's first AI Chatbot Service, AI Shopping Mate, in one of Korea's largest newspapers.
Lectures & Mentorship
Developing AI/LLM Services with Prompt Engineering
A popular 20-hour paid lecture series on Fast Campus with over 1,000 students, teaching how to build 9 different projects from chatbots to AI agents.
Mentor, AI Chatbot Program
Conducted weekly mentoring sessions for engineers and product managers, guiding them in the development of production-level AI chatbots.