Shun Zhang
Senior Generative AI Engineer
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolShun Zhang is a Senior Generative AI Engineer in San Francisco with 13 years of experience building and researching advanced AI systems across industry and academia. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Michigan and has focused his career on reinforcement learning, AI safety, value alignment, and multimodal/vision-language-action models. At NVIDIA he works on post-training multimodal and VLA models, and his prior roles include founding technical staff at an AI agent startup and research scientist/postdoc positions at IBM where he applied RL and LLMs to code generation, tool use, and EDA. Known for bridging deep research with production engineering, he blends practical system-building—shipping prototypes and agents—with rigorous safety and preference-elicitation approaches. An interesting non-obvious point: he has repeatedly moved between long-term research (PhD/postdoc) and high-impact product roles, giving him a rare fluency in both theoretical foundations and deployment challenges.
12 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science at University of MichiganIntegrated BS/MS Program Computer Science, Integrated BS/MS Program Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin
English, Chinese
Github Skills (54)
transformers10
pytorch10
python10
machine-learning10
deep-learning10
tensorflow10
natural-language-processing10
bert10
transformer10
nlp10
speech-recognition10
simulator9
robotics9
simulation9
seq2seq9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
shunzh/constrained-MDP
Mar 2019 - Mar 2020
Contributions:165 commits, 165 pushes, 2 branches in 1 year
shunzh/aim5
Jun 2013 - Mar 2021
Source code for Autonomous Intersection Management (AIM) Simulator. Compared to aim4, this involves semi-autonomous vehicles.
Contributions:29 commits, 1 PR, 4 pushes in 7 years 10 months
airsimroboticsautonomousaimsemi
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