Eric Zhou's Website

About

More info about me

Student & Software Engineer

Student at Cornell University double majoring in Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering

Birthday: 4 May 2005
GitHub: github.com/eric-zzhou
Phone: +1 (425) 466-7030
City: Bellevue, WA

Age: 20
Degree: Bachelors of Science
Email: eric-zzhou@outlook.com
Working on: Agentic AI

I am currently a student at Cornell University's College of Engineering planning to double major in Computer Science (CS) and Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE). I am especially interested in the fields of AI/ML, Internet of Things (IoT), and probability & statistics, although I am open to exploring other exciting fields.

Outside of academics, I enjoy playing sports with friends, particularly basketball, ultimate frisbee, and badminton. I also like to delve into various programming projects when anything piques my interest.

Tools/Systems

Docker

Anaconda

Virtual Environments

Git

Azure

AWS

Linux

WSL

Programming Languages

Python

Java

R

OCaml

C/C++

SQL

JavaScript

HTML

CSS

Arduino

LaTeX

Verilog

Libraries

PyTorch

Transformers

LangChain

OpenAI API

TensorFlow

Keras

scikit-learn

NumPy

SciPy

NLTK

Pandas

Matplotlib

Seaborn

Plotly

OpenCV

Requests

BeautifulSoup

Selenium

Django

Flask

Streamlit

React

jQuery

Bootstrap

Relevant Coursework

ML course starting with MLE and MAP to build to concepts like SVMs, ERM, bias variance tradeoff, kernelization, ensembling, NNs, transformers, and other models, focusing on mathematical foundations and derivations.

Machine Learning (Python) - A

Cornell University

Algorithms course covering proof techniques, and complexity analysis. Key concepts convered include greedy, dynamic programming, divide and conquer, NP completeness, randomized algorithms, approximation algorithms, and Turing machines.

Analysis of Algorithms (C++ & Python) - A+

Cornell University

Advanced systems course focused on understanding OS abstractions and effects on code performance. Covers multithreaded programming in C++ on Linux, parallelism, synchronization patterns, and performance optimization for modern NUMA servers.

System Programming (C++) - A

Cornell University

Systems level course building up from CMOS transistors to RISC-V assembly language and C. Learning about digital logic, processor architecture, memory hierarchy, and pipelining.

Computer System Organization (C & RISCV) - A+

Cornell University

Java course focused on object oriented programming (OOP). Learning about OOP, algorithm analysis, recursion, testing, searching/sorting, data structures, and graph algorithms.

Object-Oriented Programming & Data Structures (Java) - A+

Cornell University

OCaml course focused on central concepts of functional programming, delving into recursion, higher order functions, pattern matching, and data structures like trees and graphs.

Functional Programming (OCaml) - A

Cornell University

Course on discrete structures in mathematics, the theoretical backbone of CS. Learning about logical formulas, sets, functions, relations, and automata with a focus on writing proofs.

Discrete Structures - A+

Cornell University

Introductory course to Operations Research. Learning about various optimization algorithms and their application to problems including shortest path, min spanning tree, maximum flow, and many more.

Operations Research - A+

Cornell University

Resume

Resume Summary

Summary

Eric Zhou

(425) 466-7030
eric-zzhou@outlook.com

Education

Cornell University, College of Engineering

Expected May 2027

GPA: 4.13 / 4.30, CS Major GPA: 4.15 / 4.30

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering

Eastside Preparatory School

Sep 2019 - Jun 2023

General High School Diploma, GPA: 4.00/4.00

Awards

Presidential Volunteer Service Award

4 consecutive years

Received in recognition of exemplary community service, maintaining around 130 volunteer hours per year on average.

FIRST Dean's List Semifinalist

Feb 2022

Nominated for outstanding leadership after guiding my FTC robotics team to 5 state championship qualifications, securing 2 WA state championship wins, and achieving 3 World Championship qualifications.

Experience

Software Development Engineer Intern

May 2025 - Present

Amazon, Seattle, WA

Created a low-latency, scalable monitoring tool for a complex distributed data transformation pipeline, reducing incident debugging time by 90% and improving operational visibility for engineering, management, and leadership teams
Automated infrastructure provisioning using AWS CDK, built serverless backend workflows with Lambda and Athena queries to efficiently handle >500GB datasets, reducing service costs and enabling decrease in analytics time by 60x

Assistant Head of Engineering

Sep 2024 - Present

Cornell Quant Fund, Ithaca, NY

Designed and coded an options trading model to rank and sell open low-risk contracts, achieving 5x ROI with minimal drawdown; earned 2nd place out of 40 teams in the Derivatives Case at the Cornell Trading Competition
Implemented a long-term trend-following strategy leveraging momentum indicators, relative strength lines, and risk mitigation techniques, achieving a 1.2 average weekly Sharpe ratio in a 3-year backtest across multi-asset portfolios
Developing a fair, efficient exchange for Cornell Trading Competition cases using Java, Aeron, and AWS to run various trading strategies with the goal of incentivizing optimization and evaluating performance

Software Engineer Intern

May 2024 - Aug 2024

Microsoft, Redmond, WA

Leveraged Docker to build a reproducible environment for LLM training and evaluation, deployed on a remote GPU server
Conducted research on improving LLM finetuning by adjusting model structure and optimizing backpropagation to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, involving experimentation investigating impact of weight adjustments on LLM output
Adapted lm-eval library and models from HuggingFace using PyTorch and NumPy to collect model throughput and values during evaluation, facilitating optimization strategy analysis and production of improved proof-of-concept model

Software Engineer Intern

Jun 2023 - Aug 2023

The Future Laboratory, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Spearheaded fast-paced 5-intern research project to digitize cultural facets of Peking Opera, culminating in an interactive digital rendition and 1st author for the research paper accepted to ACM Chinese CHI Conference
Programmed face filter computer vision algorithms employing OpenCV, MediaPipe, and Pillow to seamlessly integrate users with traditional opera facial makeup and designed custom database queries for style matching using Pandas and SQL
Assembled an engaging, interactive website combining all project components with a Flask (Python) backend and a HTML/JavaScript/CSS frontend, further enhancing modularity and scalability with Jinja2 and HTML templates