Hi! I'm Allen Lai. I graduated from UC Irvine with a double major in Software Engineering and Data Science, and I love building the infrastructure, pipelines, and platforms that turn working code into something reliable and scalable.
My focus is platform engineering: container orchestration, CI/CD, observability, and developer tooling. During my most recent internship I worked on a Kubernetes and MLflow migration, and I've built CI/CD pipelines and Dockerized services in earlier roles. I care about the unglamorous stuff: making deploys boring, systems debuggable, and infrastructure something teams can build on without thinking about it.
I'm also deeply into building with AI. I ship side projects solo end-to-end (most recently straddled.app, a poker session tracker on the App Store), and I use AI as a core part of how I build, not just as a feature but as a collaborator in the workflow. The intersection of platform engineering and AI infrastructure is where I want to spend my career. I also gave a TEDx talk about conquering adversity.
Outside of engineering, I run an automotive business committed to fair pricing and work as a freelance photographer on a Canon R5, specializing in portraits and cars.
iOS app for tracking live poker sessions (buy-ins, cash-outs, and who owes whom) that settles the night in a single tap. Designed, built, and shipped solo, from empty repo through App Store review to a freemium Pro tier. Promoted build-in-public at the WSOP in Las Vegas.
A staged pipeline that scores short-form video content and generates editing advice, on a clean three-layer architecture: a pure engine (no web/CLI deps), a thin FastAPI adapter, and a React/Vite frontend.
A femtech venture pairing a biometric smart ring (“MenoRing”) with a companion app that tracks menopause symptoms and forecasts a user's day before it starts. Built and pitched with a team; I was the CTO who built the app, designed the architecture, and led the technical pitch to multiple wins.
Photography is where I slow down and obsess over a different kind of detail. I freelance in portraits and cars, chasing the way light wraps around glossy paint at the right hour, shooting on a Canon R5, lighting sets with Profoto B30 strobes, and pulling clean footage in Canon Log 3. I take it into DaVinci Resolve Studio and grade every clip by hand with color-space transforms and node-based looks until the color feels exactly right. The same instinct that makes me a good engineer, caring about the invisible details until the whole thing just works, is what I love about this.