Faith Luo (she/her)

Personal Statement

Highly motivated Software Engineer and ex-startup founder with 5+ years of experience driving high-impact projects from ideation to production with end-to-end ownership. Proven track record building high-performance, networked applications for real-time environments using C++, Typescript, Python, and WebGL. Top 2% Columbia Engineering graduate and UCLA graduate researcher with a strong foundation in theoretical CS, data structures, and algorithms.

Relevant Experience

Architected and engineered live systems for performance-sensitive and cross-platform environments for 250+ million users and hundreds of different devices ranging from PS4 to Android. Specialized in managing full-stack systems across Golang backend, C++ client, and Python integrations.

• Project Lead on Quest Service: Spearheaded refactor of multiple legacy services into a single unified service. Acted as PM and engineering lead: architected the system while setting long-term strategic goals and deadlines, negotiating with leadership and cross-department collaborators in design, UI, and beyond. Increased player retention by 10%.
• Application Layer Engineering point-of-contact for Trust Service: Coordinated with design, UI, QA, and player support to refactor and redesign a major service to improve user engagement.
• Spearheaded development of novel testing-oriented framework through interaction and integration tests. Expanded testing coverage which significantly improved system stability and reduced incident response time.
• Refactored HTTP request client logic in C++ to adapt to more complex systems and provide better retry logic for timeouts in high-latency regions.
• Provided input on candidate evaluation, contributing to two hires in the past year.

Co-Founded a company developing the first real-time interactive application for the blockchain using C++ and Typescript.

• Covered by MIT Technology Review. Project has been cited by academic papers measuring its impact on cryptography.
• Helped to scale team from 3 founders to 8 engineers, designers, and researchers.
• Managed ICs and reviewed code as Creative Director and lead client engineer.
• Defined visual identity for all branding, design, and social media. Scaled to 24k+ followers on X (@darkforest_eth).
• Designed and integrated low-latency real-time server reconciliation logic for the blockchain using lazy updating.
• Architected an extensible and scriptable complex windowing UI using React and Typescript.
• Developed highly-performant WebGL renderer to render millions of objects sourced from 10000+ concurrent users.
• Helped to negotiate collaborations with investors and industry partners such as Ethereum Foundation, Gnosis Chain, Thiel Foundation, Mozilla, and others. Participated in fundraising leading to eight-figure valuation by a top VC.
• Gave talks at international conferences such as EthGlobal.

Relevant Projects

UnitLib - A highly-optimized C++ matrix and vector library supporting arbitrary SI units and beyond using C++20 compile-time programming features. Comparable to or faster than glfw, the industry-standard matrix library, in a fraction of the lines of code, while offering type and unit safety on matrices. [github]

xml-peruse - A typed and memory-optimized XML parser for Typescript/Javascript. [github]

Sappho in Space - A web experiment and interactive game built in a real-time simulation and physics engine with collision rendered entirely using DOM elements. Built in React and Typescript. [github] [web game]

Dark Forest Client - Highly-performant realtime renderer and windowing UI for the web. 230+ stars on Github. [github]

Little Planet Procedural - Procedural landscapes generated in the browser. 100+ stars on Github. [github] [demo]

Skills

Deep knowledge of C++, Typescript/Javascript, HTML/CSS, Python. Proficient in WebGL, C, C#, Java, Linux.

Technologies: P4, Git, React, Node.js

Spoken Languages: English (native), Chinese (fluent), Japanese (fluent)

Additional Experience

Engineer on Python Infra team. Static and dynamic analysis for developer tooling using Python metaprogramming.

Engineer and PM on Editor Experience team. Developed plugins for FigJam and led Scale Tool strike. Typescript/WebGL.

Developed open-source applications using zero-knowledge proofs and experimental applied cryptography.

Developed map applications for Canadian public service projects using Javascript and WebGL.

Publications

[2022] Thomas Chen, Hui Lu, Teeramet Kunpittaya, Faith (Alan) Luo. A review of zk-snarks. arXiv preprint arXiv: 2202.06877. 91 citations. [Google scholar link]

Research Experience

Advised by Prof. Jiayin Lu, Ying Jiang, and Chenfanfu Jiang. Developing performant Reinforcement Learning models in Python and C++ for mesh simplification and problems in computational geometry and computer graphics. Working collaboratively with international partners. Mentoring a UCLA undergraduate student. Built a highly-performant mesh representation library in Python optimized for learning problems.

Advised by Prof. Tim Roughgarden. Researched zero-knowledge proofs and blockchains. Organized weekly reading group for undergraduate and graduate students. Published paper with 91 citations on arXiv preprint.

Organization and Talks

[2022] Columbia Blockchain Reading Group, presenter, host, and organizer (advised by Prof. Tim Roughgarden)

[2020] zkSNARKs for Hidden Information Blockchain Games, presenter (zkSummit 6)

[2020] Dark Forest: Challenges and Constraints in ZK Gaming, presenter (EthGlobal)

[2020] Applied cryptography for games, presenter/panelist (Stanford Blockchain Conference)