Tairan Ji

Product Engineer @ Eudia | Amherst College | Prev. ML Systems @ Harvard | AI Safety Research

Amherst, Massachusetts, United States

About

Experience

  • Product Engineer at Eudia
    Jun 2026 - Present · 1 mo

  • Amherst College (1 yr 10 mos)
    • AI Safety Researcher, Mechanistic Interpretability
      Jun 2025 - May 2026 · 1 yr

      Under the supervision of Prof. Shira Wein, I'm applied mechanistic interpretability techniques to analyze the internal computations of certain fine-tuned encoder-only LLMs (e.g., BERT variants)

    • President, AI Safety at Amherst
      Aug 2024 - May 2026 · 1 yr 10 mos

      Co-Founded Amherst College's first AI safety club, serving as VP (Aug 2024 - May 2025) before becoming president. ➡️Led club strategy and educational programing, growing our community to 140+ students while cultivating a dedicated core of ~10 members for weekly in-depth workshops ➡️Organized and facilitated 10 workshops per semester on topics including red teaming, mechanistic interpretability, and AI governance ➡️Represented the club at conferences, building partnerships with leading AI safety organizations and securing distinguished speakers like researcher at OpenAI

    • Performance Modeling Research Engineer
      Sep 2024 - May 2025 · 9 mos

      Under the guidance of Professor Kristy Gardner, I developed a program in Mathematica to analyze the trade-offs between power consumption and user latency in data centers. The program leveraged a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster to solve complex stochastic models, deriving key performance metrics like wait time and throughput to provide insights that inform optimal management policies for distributed systems.

  • Ideas 2 Innovation: Entrepreneurship @ Amherst (United States · Hybrid)
    • Software Engineering Team Lead
      May 2025 - May 2026 · 1 yr 1 mo

      I led a 24+ person engineering team at Amherst College's startup accelerator, working on 10+ software projects in parallel for startups, nonprofits, and Amherst College. ➡️Created system designs for projects and ensure timely, industry-standard deliverables (PRs, documentation, deployment workflows, >90% test coverage) ➡️Contributed full-stack code (Python, Django, JavaScript) across key initiatives, including Amherst Coursework, a highly-customizable, easy-to-use replacement of Amherst College's current course catalog ➡️Liaised with stakeholders to translate their needs into actionable engineering milestones

    • Senior Software Engineer
      Sep 2024 - May 2025 · 9 mos

      As a senior software engineer, I collaborated with a team of 20+ engineers and TPMs to bring impactful projects from concept to delivery. ➡Guided engineering efforts across 6 parallel projects to ensure project alignment, high-quality deliverables (PRs, Issues, Deployment Workflows, etc), and timely completion ➡Led system design, feature development, and unit testing across 3 projects using Django, Python, JavaScript, and .yml scripts ➡ Recruited and mentored new engineers, fostering skills to take projects from concept to launch (0 → 1)

  • Machine Learning Research Engineer at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
    May 2024 - Sep 2024 · 5 mos

    As a visiting member of Professor Minlan Yu's group, I performed machine learning systems (MLSys) research, contributing to projects related to the scheduling of large language model (LLM) inference jobs at data centers. I created both rapid-prototype and high-fidelity Python models of inference systems, enabling quick, low-cost testing of novel algorithms.

  • Amherst College (Amherst, Massachusetts, United States · On-site)
    • Performance Modeling Research Engineer
      Jun 2023 - Dec 2023 · 7 mos

      Under the guidance of Professor Kristy Gardner, I completed a project that optimized store designs of fast-food restaurants to reduce customer wait times, creating a Python simulation to test the optimality of different designs and customer-serving policies. The project's findings were showcased in an abstract and a poster presentation.

    • AI in the Liberal Arts Initiative Organizer
      Jan 2023 - Dec 2023 · 1 yr

      Co-founded Amherst's inaugural hackathon, focusing on leveraging AI to improve campus sustainability. Facilitated a series of panels and discussions on the intersection of AI with ethics, the humanities, and the arts.