Ryan Chen
I'm a computer science graduate student at USC interested in developing cool software. I enjoy tinkering with new technology to create globally relevant solutions.
Experience
May 2026 — Aug 2026
DevOps Intern
Dematic
Built an internal developer platform that established a golden path for deploying microservices with optional databases to GKE Autopilot. Automated Kubernetes and ArgoCD configuration generation, reducing environment deployment time from weeks to 30 minutes, and implemented secure GitOps workflows using GitLab CI, Terraform, and Terragrunt.
Sep 2025 — Dec 2025
Research Assistant
FORTIS Lab at USC
Conducted literature reviews across 7+ research papers on machine learning for wildfire prediction, detection, and evacuation planning. Evaluated 3+ wildfire datasets for model training and assessment while investigating how TyphoFormer could be adapted for wildfire forecasting.
Jan 2023 — Jun 2025
Lead Software Engineer
IEEE HKN Honors Society at UC San Diego
Directed an 8-person engineering team through three full-cycle projects, reducing delivery delays by approximately 30%. Increased team productivity by approximately 50% through structured sprint planning, standups, and code reviews while coordinating requirements across 5+ organization branches for products serving 1,000+ users.
Jun 2024 — Dec 2024
Software Engineer Intern
Project Falcon
Built the company's first production-ready legal document pipeline in four weeks, accelerating document intake by approximately 60%. Developed an LLM-powered legal chatbot, fine-tuned Dolly 2.0 on AWS EC2, and engineered a Pinecone retrieval system supporting 10,000+ document embeddings with sub-second retrieval.
Mar 2024 — Dec 2024
CS Instructional Assistant
UC San Diego Computer Science Department
Supported more than 460 students in Advanced Data Structures through instruction focused on debugging, code optimization, and core data-structure concepts. Collaborated with faculty to improve course delivery and student engagement.
Skills
GCP
Kubernetes
ArgoCD
Terraform
JavaScript
TypeScript
React
GCP
Kubernetes
ArgoCD
Terraform
JavaScript
TypeScript
React
Next.js
TailwindCSS
Python
Java
C/C++
PyTorch
Next.js
TailwindCSS
Python
Java
C/C++
PyTorch
Projects
RL Autonomous Vehicle
June 2025
Developed a custom wrapper around the highway-env intersection scenario to evaluate and benchmark reinforcement learning algorithms for autonomous driving. Implemented a reward structure focused on safety and route completion using Python and Gymnasium. Trained and compared DQN, REINFORCE, A2C, SAC, and PPO, achieving strong results within 200k training steps.
AI for NYT Connections
March 2025
Developed AI agents to solve The New York Times Connections game using Sentence-BERT clustering, Transformer models, and REINFORCE-based reinforcement learning. Designed evaluation strategies against a random-guessing baseline and analyzed performance using metrics like average guesses and Jaccard similarity. Focused on optimizing semantic grouping and decision-making through NLP and RL techniques.
Personal TA
March 2025
Built a personal AI-powered teaching assistant using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to provide fast, context-aware tutoring via the Gemini API. Leveraged Qdrant Cloud and embedding models for efficient context retrieval, and integrated a pre-trained LLM for structured, accurate responses. Achieved high performance with 3.7s average response time and optimized document processing and retrieval speeds over large course materials.
RL-Based Stock Trading Agents
March 2025
Built a custom Gymnasium environment for training and evaluating reinforcement learning agents on real-world stock trading tasks using Yahoo Finance data (2014–2024). Implemented and trained Q-Learning, REINFORCE, and A2C algorithms. Evaluated performance with financial metrics such as return percentage, Sharpe ratio, and maximum drawdown.
HKN Membership Portal
June 2025
Developed a full-stack membership system for HKN’s induction workflows using Django, Svelte, JavaScript, and AWS EC2. Implemented secure authentication, role-based access control, and dynamic dashboards for over 1,000 active users. Designed a microservice-based architecture with integrated CI/CD pipelines to ensure scalability and reliability.
Education
University of Southern California
Master of Science, Computer Science
University of California, San Diego
Bachelor of Science, Mathematics-Computer Science
Let's Connect!
1
yuyou.chen@usc.edu
2
ryan.yychen@gmail.com
Los Angeles, California
