Roy Zhao

Selected work

Case Studies

Two deployed applications, presented through their product and engineering evidence.

Household finance

A household finance application for linked-account transaction tracking, analysis, and reusable dashboard views.

Integrated Firebase authentication, Plaid account linking and webhooks, and PostgreSQL-backed dashboards.
Built an AI-assisted Named Query workflow that generates household-scoped, read-only SQL.
Operated the app on Linux with Docker Compose, Cloudflare ingress, Grafana monitoring, and S3 backup checks.

React · TypeScript · FastAPI · PostgreSQL · Plaid · Firebase · OpenAI

Live app Source code ↗

Live app Source code ↗

Time observability

A serverless time observability application used daily to record and review how time is spent across days and weeks.

Accumulated 5,300+ DynamoDB records through a Vue frontend and FastAPI Lambda backend over 5+ months.
Migrated thousands of SQLite records to a user-scoped DynamoDB model without data loss.
Added Cognito with Google sign-in and a guest mode that protects profile and category mutations.

Vue · TypeScript · FastAPI · Lambda · API Gateway · DynamoDB · Cognito · CloudFront

Live app

Live app

Professional work

Jun 2025 - Present Chicago, IL

AI Enablement Intern

Reduced an internal agent's per-trace token cost by 76% and end-to-end latency by 39%, validated with Langfuse traces.
Triaged deployment and runtime failures in a production EKS environment through pod state, logs, and cluster events.
Evaluated LLM observability platforms and delivered recommendations for completing evaluation cycles.

Feb 2025 - May 2025 Champaign, IL

Infrastructure Team Member

Shipped calendar UI formatting updates for ACM UIUC's production website serving 1,000+ members.
Contributed through code reviews, sprint planning, and a GitHub Actions CI/CD workflow.

One-page overview

Roy Zhao · Software Engineering

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