Kai Yan
Summary
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SeniorKai Yan is a Senior Research Scientist based in New Zealand with a decade of experience at the intersection of computer graphics, real-time rendering, and AI-driven world modeling. He has held research roles at top labs including NVIDIA, Meta, Adobe, and Tencent, and brings deep technical expertise in shader programming, C/C++, C#, Unity3D and UE4. His work spans differentiable rendering, generation, and agentic/complex systems—applying graphics techniques to build interactive 3D worlds and AI infrastructure. Kai pairs academic rigor (PhD work at UC Irvine) with production-facing engineering from stints at Google, Airbnb and Square, enabling rapid prototype-to-product translation. He’s actively hiring and unusually comfortable bridging non-CS collaborators into graphics and agentic research, making him a pragmatic translator between creative teams and cutting-edge technical systems.
10 years of coding experience
Github Skills (13)
gpu-instancing10
flocking10
compute-shader10
boids10
gpgpu9
path-tracing7
unity3d6
csharp5
virtual-environment3
physically-based-rendering3
simulation3
pbr3
live-coding3
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
aceyan/kai-cs-imgd-420x
Jan 2020 - Mar 2020
Contributions:47 commits, 121 pushes, 1 branch in 1 month
aceyan/UE4_Lab
May 2021 - Jul 2021
Contributions:34 commits, 49 pushes, 1 branch in 1 month
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