Sam Zhong
Harnessing the power of AI to revolutionize software and finance.
Software · NLP Research · FinTech
Skills
Technical skills across the stack.
From LLM research to full-stack products — here's what I work with.
Languages
AI / ML
Web & APIs
Cloud & Tools
Certifications
AWS Certified Developer – Associate
Amazon Web Services
Issued Nov 2025
AWS Certified AI Practitioner
Amazon Web Services
Issued Oct 2025
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Amazon Web Services
Issued Aug 2025
Experience
Where I've worked and what I've built.
Internships, research, leadership, and the occasional close call.
Health Canada
InternshipSoftware Engineer Intern
May 2025 – Present
Ottawa, ON
- Owned end-to-end development of a Next.js + FastAPI production system, scaling to 5× more users than the initial MVP while mentoring interns and coordinating feature delivery.
- Implemented Supabase authentication, PostgreSQL database, and S3 object storage for secure user management and scalable data persistence.
- Established Docker-based CI/CD pipelines via Azure App Service with automated testing and rollback, replacing ad-hoc manual releases.
Health Canada
InternshipMachine Learning Intern
Jan 2025 – Apr 2025
Ottawa, ON
- Designed a Hybrid Search RAG system (BGE-M3 + cross-encoder reranker + metadata filtering), improving answer precision from ~52% → 89% on internal QA benchmarks.
- Built a web search agent with LangChain memory for multi-turn context, improving factual recall by 30%+.
- Developed a DeepEval-based evaluation pipeline (LLM-as-a-Judge, BLEU, ROUGE) that reduced evaluation cycles from days to under an hour.
- Deployed local LLMs via vLLM for high-throughput inference, supporting 3–4× higher concurrency.
Sep 2024 – Present
Sydney, NSW
- First-author EMNLP 2025 paper proposing EthosAgents — a role-playing persona framework for pluralistic alignment in healthcare LLMs, improving value diversity by 40% over prior approaches on the VITAL benchmark.
- First-author paper on latent value alignment via internal activation steering with controlled value vectors, achieving 30% gains over persona-based methods without fine-tuning.
JasminTechs
StartupCo-Founder
Sep 2024 – May 2025
Waterloo, ON
- Co-founded an AI tutoring platform from 0→1, motivated by gaps in personalization and interactivity in existing AI education tools.
- Built a Next.js + Flask architecture on AWS with Redis session memory and S3 storage, designed to support 100+ concurrent users.
- Led internal evaluation where 70%+ of users reported positive feedback, validating early product–market fit.
Datacurve
LeadershipAmbassador
Jan 2026 – Present
Remote
- Connected with top ML engineers and researchers worldwide to collaborate on cutting-edge AI/ML projects and research initiatives.
- Represent Datacurve's community of elite ML practitioners — bridging talented engineers with high-impact projects in the ML space.
WAT.ai
LeadershipTechnical Project Manager
May 2025 – Jan 2026
Waterloo, ON
- Led a team of 9 building sentiment analysis and sarcasm detection models for stock market insights.
The GoldenHack
LeadershipDirector of Technology
Jun 2024 – Apr 2025
Waterloo, ON
- Designed and developed Waterloo's largest Business + Tech hackathon website.
- Collaborated with the team to innovate and improve the event experience.
Akhny Solutions
InternshipSoftware Engineer Intern
May 2024 – Aug 2024
Milton, ON
- Designed mobile UI in Figma and implemented React Native interfaces, reducing navigation time by 40% and improving order completion rates.
- Developed Node.js + MongoDB backend with OAuth 2.0 authentication and AES/bcrypt encryption for secure order tracking and payment validation.
- Wrote 20+ unit and integration tests for backend APIs, catching regressions before release.
JuniorKids AI
InternshipSoftware AI Developer
Apr 2024 – Oct 2024
Montreal, QC
- Automated sentiment data collection by scraping and filtering 500K+ Reddit posts with spaCy NER, reducing manual data preparation effort by 80%.
- Increased sentiment classification accuracy by 22% by fine-tuning a BERT model on historical Reddit posts and labeled price movement data.
- Built a RAG-based financial chatbot integrating company reports and news retrieval for consolidated market overviews.
- Developed an LSTM forecasting pipeline combining sentiment signals and historical prices to generate short-term trend insights.
Sep 2024 – Dec 2024
Waterloo, ON
- Developed a Chrome extension used by 50+ users to extract browsing data and build knowledge graphs for learning analysis.
- Integrated LLM-based recommendations to surface related concepts, improving learning speed by 35%.
Laurier Fintech
LeadershipAlgorithm Developer
Oct 2023 – Jun 2024
Waterloo, ON
- Spearheaded development of an open-source FinTech library, enhancing trading algorithms with in-depth backtesting for realistic market simulation.
Uforse Education Group
TeachingComputer Science Instructor
Sep 2023 – Jan 2025
Ontario, Canada
- Designed and delivered online CS courses for high school students preparing for CCC and Euclid Contest.
- Covered data types, data structures, and algorithms; provided personalized mentoring and adapted curriculum to student needs.
Amazon
Almost ✓(｡•ˇ‸ˇ•｡)Software Development Engineer
Waitlisted
Canada
- Passed two interview rounds. Then gracefully ended up on the waitlist.
Projects
Things I've built.
Project
Jul 2025arXiv Paper Assistant
Chrome extension that enhances arXiv paper reading — AI-powered summaries, smart collections, and sidebar tools for researchers.
Project
Sep – Dec 2024UWPilot
Course planning tool for UWaterloo students — prerequisite tree visualization, QUEST schedule import, and academic pathway planning.
Project
Nov 2024AI HealthBridge
Breaks language barriers for patients in Canada — real-time voice transcription, BERT NER on PubMED, and RAG with Llama-3.2-90B-Vision.
Project
May – Oct 2024TrendSage
Correlates Reddit & 4Chan /biz sentiment with real stock trends using Apewisdom API, NLP models, and market data.
Project
Aug 2024Fin4All
Democratizes investing — real-time stock analysis, Reddit sentiment insights, and personalized investment recommendations for all experience levels.
Project
Aug 2024MedScan Mentor
Helps medical students develop brain disease detection skills from CT scans with YOLOv5-powered real-time feedback.
Research
NLP Applications, Safety & Alignment in LLMs.
Making large language models more ethically aligned and inclusive.
Pluralistic Alignment for Healthcare: A Role-Driven Framework
Jiayou Zhong et al.
A lightweight, role-based framework that generates structured ethical personas to simulate varied viewpoints. Evaluated on the VITAL benchmark, the method outperforms prior approaches across Overton, Steerable, and Distributional alignment settings — enabling scalable, fine-tuning-free alignment for inclusive and ethically sensitive AI.
VISPA: Pluralistic Alignment via Automatic Value Selection and Activation
Jiayou Zhong et al.
Explores latent value alignment by steering hidden layer activations with controlled value vectors, enabling interpretable moral reasoning in large language models without fine-tuning.
GitHub
Contributions in the last year.
A year of commits — research prototypes, side projects, and late-night debugging sessions.
Off The Clock
K-dramas, soccer, and basketball.
The fun side. Because a site without personality is just a CV.
K-drama
What I watch
My Liberation Notes
All-time favorite
Can Love Be Translated
Currently watching
Soccer
Barca always
FC Barcelona through and through. The beautiful game at its finest — tiki-taka, pressing, and pure soccer.
Messi
GOAT.
Pedri
My best current Barcelona player
Basketball
Steph Curry.
Warriors at home.
Best shooter ever. The Golden State Warriors are still the home team.