Qi Zhao

Toronto, ON, Canada · (416)-666-0743 · steve-qi.zhao@outlook.com

I am a Software Development Engineer at Amazon (Alexa / Edge AI), with 7+ years of experience building edge-AI and on-device systems in C++/Python across embedded Linux, automotive, and ambient-computing platforms. I enjoy turning ambiguous, greenfield architecture into shipped, reusable systems, and have recently extended my on-device work into cloud-based LLM pipelines that reason over ambient perception data.

Work Experience

Software Development Engineer – Ambient AI & GenAI (Edge and Cloud)

Amazon (Alexa / Edge AI), Toronto, Canada
  • As the team extended its on-device small-LLM platform to the cloud, designed the cloud evaluation system — enabling reproducible, faster-than-real-time replay of recorded multimodal data through the live production stack via a unified virtual-clock abstraction, replacing drift-prone one-off scripts with a single source of truth for model evaluation and end-to-end system verification.
  • As founding engineer on a greenfield on-device ambient-AI platform, designed and built its core — a LangGraph-based task and workflow orchestration framework backed by a Neo4j knowledge-graph context store — plus a rapid-experimentation framework that cut new-task iteration from days to hours.
  • Owned end-to-end delivery of on-device LLM inference capabilities, leading design and integration across multiple partner teams, and drove the first in-vehicle demonstration of an on-device LLM to VP-level leadership, validating technical feasibility for the program.
    • 2025 – Present

    Software Development Engineer – Alexa Hybrid Engine (AHE)

    Amazon (Alexa / Edge AI), Toronto, Canada
  • Led the port and production bring-up of AHE onto an Amazon-customized embedded Linux OS and a Qualcomm-based automotive platform, re-architecting AHE into a system service and owning the end-to-end release lifecycle — Yocto recipes, CI/CD, OTA/model delivery, and release stabilization.
  • Primary technical point of contact for the automotive workstream — bridged 10+ internal partner/domain teams and served as sole AHE contact for OEM customer programs (BMW, Stellantis), owning design decisions, critical code reviews, and technical guidance that unblocked OEM program releases.
  • Led end-to-end security certification of AHE across both Automotive and Amazon Echo programs (architecture review, threat modeling, Coverity/Fortify + manual code review, third-party penetration testing, and incident-response planning), producing reusable tooling and docs adopted as the baseline for later reviews.
  • Mentored new hires and junior engineers (onboarding, code reviews, knowledge-transfer sessions, runbooks) and interviewed candidates as part of the team's hiring process — strengthening team ramp-up and growth.
    • May 2022 – 2025

    Software Developer

    SOTI Inc, Mississauga, Canada
  • Designed core C++ modules for a Linux device-management agent — a multithreaded task scheduler and a cross-distribution package manager — and refactored networking and kiosk-mode components to improve stability.
  • Built and shipped a Tizen native agent (enrollment, notifications, remote control, sensor collection) to production across CMake/cross-compilation, and added automated unit-test coverage reporting to the CI/CD pipeline.
    • May 2019 – May 2022

    Teaching Assistant

    University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
  • Organized and led CSC258 Computer Organization (prof:Steve Engels) course tutorials in fall and winter 2018, fall 2019.
  • Provided students with one-on-one tutoring and summarized common problems to help professors improve course design.
  • Demonstrated exceptional communication and leadership skills in a team-based environment.
    • Sep 2018 – Apr 2019

    IT Consultant Intern

    Sichuan Communication Design, China Comservice, Chengdu, China
  • Coordinated the network development among digital TV set-top boxes and designed an initial version of the database.
  • Designed webpage for front-end users via interfaces with the back-end database using the AngularJS framework.
  • Supported the Online Intelligent Fault Diagnosis System for set-up boxes and created the client-side web application.
    • Jul 2017 - Oct 2017

    Education

    University of Toronto

    Master of Science in Applied Computing (MScAC)

    Completed all courses with excellent grades.
    Took 8-month internship at SOTI and completed porting of Tizen system project from scratch.

    Click here to see ARIA 2019 Banner , Internship Report or Download Mitacs Accelerate Award Report
    Sep 2018 - Dec 2019

    Xi'an Jiaotong University (China)

    Bachelor of Engineering (BEng)
    Department of Computer Science and Technology, School of Electronic and Information Engineering

    GPA: 3.58 / Average Score: 86.55

    Sep 2014 - Jun 2018

    National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (Taiwan)

    Student Exchange Program
    Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, College of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    GPA: 4.07

    Sep 2016 - Jan 2017

    Skills

    Programming Languages & Tools
    • C++
    • C
    • Python
    • Java
    • Linux Bash
    Databases
    • MySQL
    • Sqlserver
    AI / ML
    • On-device / edge LLMs, LangChain / LangGraph, prompt engineering & LLM evaluation, Amazon Bedrock
    Systems & Infrastructure
    • Embedded Linux, Yocto / BitBake, systemd, CMake, cross-compilation, multithreading
    Cloud, Data & Platforms
    • Amazon AWS (Lambda, SQS, DynamoDB), SQL / NoSQL, Neo4j, Android
    Other Skills & Knowledge
    • Development Tools: Git, GitHub Enterprise, Azure DevOps
    • CI/CD Pipeline & OTA/model delivery
    • Teamwork Tools: Jira, Asana, Kanban

    Awards & Honors