Summary
Ted Li is a full-stack applied AI engineer with 11 years of experience building high-impact, revenue-driving systems for consumer products and platforms. He has led AI and payments initiatives at companies from Apple and Google to Roblox and Character.AI, most recently driving the AI stack and product integration for a companion app with 3M+ downloads and $12M ARR. Ted blends deep systems and backend expertise—modernizing payments and marketplace architectures—with productionizing large multimodal LLMs, embeddings, and inference optimizations. He repeatedly bridges AI and product by designing data, caching, and context-assembly layers that close the loop between model outputs and measurable user outcomes. Based in San Jose, he couples hands-on engineering and cross-functional leadership to scale monetization and retention for subscription-first businesses. A former structural engineering and math student, he brings a rare mix of analytical rigor and product-minded execution to complex technical problems.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS) Mathematics, Bachelor of Science (BS) Mathematics at Queens College
Master of Science (M.S.) Computer Science, Master of Science (M.S.) Computer Science at Columbia Engineering
Bachelor of Science (BS) Civil Engineering, Bachelor of Science (BS) Civil Engineering at Columbia University
English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German