Backend / platform & AI engineer · Sydney
Formerly Engineering Manager at Motosoft on the LetsRide platform (Jan–May 2026) — Python (FastAPI), AWS CDK across 7 stacks (Aurora Serverless v2, ECS Fargate, CloudFront, WAFv2), a Rust + Go geospatial routing pipeline, and distributed WebSockets at scale. That work lives in private repos.
These days I build AI and agentic systems on that backend foundation — LLM tools, retrieval, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers — alongside research on how transformers represent meaning. Open to senior backend / full-stack roles.
- research-helper — a published Claude Code plugin (MIT) with five model-invoked agent-skills for CS/ML/NLP research: literature discovery, paper digests, experiment design, code scaffolding, and paired-statistics analysis (~6,400 lines of Python).
- MCP connector demos — orchestrator + self-built MCP server pairs (Anthropic SDK, Cloudflare Workers, BM25 retrieval, bearer auth, read-only guardrails) that answer questions grounded in a site's own content — for example, a live demo grounded in unsw.edu.au. More demos and write-ups at morgan-li.dev.
- NLP research — orthogonal vs. subtractive negation in transformer embeddings, applied to sarcasm detection, with the UNSW NLP Research Group.
Ten years of game modding — 200,000+ aggregate downloads across the pinned RimWorld and BattleTech projects, with international collaborators in Germany, Poland, the U.S., and Hong Kong.
- MoveBase (Home Mover) — multi-building relocation in RimWorld, modelled as cycle detection on a lazy spatial dependency graph; cycles broken by a feedback-vertex heuristic.
- AwsomeInventory — race-free inventory loadouts with a three-tier pub-sub event mesh and Schmitt-trigger hysteresis on inventory margins; 224 of 267 commits on the rebuilt successor mod.
- RogueTechPerfFixes — 100–200% perf gains in BattleTech via JetBrains Profiler, Cecil IL injection, and Harmony patching.