07 Proprietary
Equities Research Dashboard
Systematic hedge fund
Factor reporting and analytics surface for an investment team.
Python React Snowflake AWS
2025
Desmond Kao
I build at the front edge of applied AI: agentic tooling, MCP backends, retrieval systems, and the production platforms that put them in front of real users. Most recently at Apple.
About
Originally from San Francisco, I study Computer Science at New York University and build production AI systems, most recently at Apple, and before that for Yale's School of Engineering and two New York hedge funds.
I work on AI that has to hold up under real use: agents that call the right tool, retrieval that returns the right document, platforms people keep reaching for long after the demo. Most of that work lives behind a login, so what's public here is the shape of it rather than the detail.
Away from the terminal I'm a classical pianist of sixteen years, and I train Muay Thai and produce music.
- Languages
- Python Java SQL JavaScript TypeScript Swift C# C
- Frameworks
- Spring Boot Spring AI React Next.js SwiftUI Node.js Express FastAPI Flask REST OAuth 2.0 pytest JUnit
- AI & Data
- LLM APIs RAG MCP LangGraph Langfuse NLP PyTorch TensorFlow Hugging Face Qdrant pandas NumPy
- Infrastructure
- AWS Azure Docker Kubernetes Linux/Unix CI/CD GitHub Actions PostgreSQL MySQL Snowflake Redis Firebase
Experience
-
May 2026 – Aug 2026
Austin, TX
Apple
Backend services and internal developer tooling for AI-assisted workflows.
-
Dec 2025 – May 2026
New Haven, CT
Yale School of Engineering
A full-stack platform bringing retrieval-based AI assistants to engineering coursework.
-
Jun 2025 – Dec 2025
New York, NY
AlphaQuest
Internal LLM tooling and research dashboards for investment staff.
-
Dec 2024 – May 2025
New York, NY
Catenary Alternatives Asset Management
A firmwide research data platform and the NLP pipelines feeding it.
Projects
01
2fish
AI dream analysis, on the App Store
A published iOS app pairing a native SwiftUI client with a Node/Express backend, plus a speech-to-text layer for hands-free capture.
Swift SwiftUI Node.js Express Firebase Anthropic API
2025
02
Traffixplorer
Point72 Cubist Hackathon
NYC congestion forecasting behind a React 3D map with a natural-language query interface. Five people, twenty-four hours.
Python Flask Keras statsmodels React
2025
03
Intra IQ
Enterprise RAG
Document intelligence over company knowledge bases — natural-language querying across internal corpora.
Python Claude API RAG FastAPI React
2025
04
HoneyBee
Johnson & Johnson Hackathon — Finalist
Talent matching with agentic workflows and verifiable credentials.
Python AI Agents Blockchain React
2025
05
VectorMail
Cornell Hackathon
Semantic search across message templates, wired to a vector database and a live dashboard.
Python Pinecone OpenAI API Streamlit
2024
06
DIY AI
HP-funded research at Yale
A lightweight language model built from scratch, pruned and quantized for low-power on-device inference.
Python TensorFlow Keras
2024
08 Proprietary
Firmwide Data Assistant
Systematic hedge fund
Natural-language access to internal company data.
Python FastAPI RAG Snowflake
2025
Education
New York University
B.A. in Computer Science
Sep 2023 – May 2027 New York, NY
Coursework
Data Structures Algorithms Operating Systems (Linux/Unix) Computer Systems Organization Parallel Computing Data Management & Analysis Discrete Mathematics Linear Algebra Principles of Data Science I & II
Honors & Leadership
- Finalist, Johnson & Johnson Hackathon
- Founder, 2fish — NYU Leslie eLab