Tianao (Owen) Zeng

About / Contact

Building AI systems that are measurable, reliable, and ready to ship.

I am an AI Systems / ML Engineer focused on LLM systems, generative models, and multimodal perception. I like problems where research ideas have to survive real constraints: limited compute, noisy data, latency budgets, reproducibility requirements, and production operations.

Alongside AI research and systems work, I have built full-stack products across mobile, backend services, infrastructure, payments, media pipelines, and admin operations. That product background shapes how I design AI systems: measurable, usable, maintainable, and ready to ship.

My research path also includes EEG and wearable-sensing work at Khan Lab at USC, where I built experiment software, firmware support, data-processing pipelines, and machine-learning classifiers for cognitive and affective-state analysis.

AI Systems

LLM reinforcement learning, diffusion editing, multimodal perception, and evaluation-first ML engineering.

Full-Stack Depth

Mobile, backend services, PostgreSQL, Docker, AWS media pipelines, payments, chat, and admin operations.

Research Tools

Experiment software, firmware support, EEG/wearable data processing, feature extraction, and classical ML.

Contact

Location
Pittsburgh, PA / United States

Work

Rally

Co-founder and Full Stack Developer | Sep. 2024 - Sep. 2025

Details

XPENG Motors

Software Engineer Intern | May 2024 - Aug. 2024

Education

Carnegie Mellon University logo

Carnegie Mellon University

Master of Science, Artificial Intelligence Engineering - Electrical and Computer Engineering

4.0/4.0 | Expected Dec. 2026

University of Southern California logo

University of Southern California

Bachelor of Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering

3.76/4.0 | Jan. 2023 - May 2025

Research

Khan Lab at USC

Built software, firmware, data processing, and ML analysis workflows for EEG-based cognitive and affective-state experiments.

Khan Lab