# Steven Li > Staff Software Engineer at Meta Superintelligence Lab Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/stevenli2 I'm currently a Staff Software Engineer working on large-scale LLM/LDM training and inference optimizations of frontier models—and previously leading ML infrastructure for aligning media generation models—at Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). I'm also an active angel investor, both personally and as a scout at a16z. Prior to MSL, I built two companies, including Brightroom (which was acquired in early 2025), an AI copilot that helped students across 30+ schools apply to their dream colleges. Before that, I studied Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Broadly, my technical interests lie in building distributed systems that optimize AI research productivity. Outside of work, I like playing tennis, chess, and poker. Please feel free to reach out! ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer - Meta Superintelligence Lab (MSL) @ Meta Jan 2024 – Present | Menlo Park, CA April 2026-: Working on large-scale LLM/LDM training and inference optimizations of frontier models. Jan 2024 - March 2026: Leading ML infra used by ~20 teams internally for aligning multimedia generation (image, video, audio) models at Meta's Superintelligence Labs (MSL), including the Synthetic Data Platform for large-scale synthetic data generation and curation; AutoEval Platform for automated evals; and human annotation tooling for safety redteaming and preference labeling. Created (initially as sole IC and later building the team, continuing to be the top code contributor) and have end-to-end responsibilities over the following systems. - Synthetic Data Platform: A system for large-scale synthetic data generation, curation for LLM and LDM model training and evaluation, auto-labeling with multimodal LLMs, and end-to-end adversarial testing. Used by 15+ teams to support launches for all Meta AI media products; Llama dataset curation use cases; and early model prototypes at the scale of hundreds of millions of examples - RedOps: A data annotation platform where humans and models work together to help us build and iterate on the highest quality Gen AI models and products now used by labelers and redteamers across multiple orgs, primarily for safety-quality alignment - AutoEval: A Python-based framework for building benchmark evaluators and executing model evaluation workflows used to evaluate diffusion models across over a dozen benchmarks ### Angel Investor @ Various Companies Jan 2023 – Present Investments in Applied Compute, Recursive Superintelligence, Hillclimb, Trajectory, Sail Research, Factor Labs, Corridor, Modal, Listen Labs, YouLearn, Supermemory, Sherpa Labs, Odyssey, Mastra, Vendora, Tandem, and Uprise. a16z scout (March 2026-); Felicis scout (Jan 2025 - March 2026). ### Advisor (nights and weekends) @ Brightroom Jan 2025 – Jan 2025 Stayed on as an advisor post-acquisition to facilitate a smooth transition to our acquirer. ### Cofounder (nights and weekends) @ Brightroom Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 [Brightroom was acquired in Jan 2025.] As a nights and weekends project, partnered with my friend Andrew Huang to start Brightroom, an applied AI company focused on helping high school students improve their writing with copilots, voice agents, and more, initially focused on college application advisory. Grew usage to students across ~30 high schools and led Brightroom through an acquisition in Jan. 2025. I was responsible for all things server-side (architecture, data modeling, writing APIs, building RAG pipelines, and setting up CI/CD) and product direction. During our acquisition, I led the negotiation of terms and asset and knowledge transfer process (including ramping up new engineers at our acquirer). ### Software Engineer @ Frec Jan 2023 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco, California, United States Employee #11 (engineer #7) building products typically offered to high-net-worth individuals through wealth advisors and bringing them to a wider audience, starting with emerging affluent customers. Frec is backed by $26.4m in funding from top investors, including Greylock. Owned Frec Treasury, a cash management product that scans customers' deposit account activity; automates investments into money market funds; and is a payment method for credit card bills and funding source for other products on the platform. Did market research and customer interviews, defined core features, and ultimately built Frec Treasury. I also owned our email marketing integration and worked on our referral program, powering the mechanism of customers inviting their friends and receiving rewards when certain conditions are met by the referee. Separate from my engineering responsibilities, I also served as an advisor to the founder and CEO on strategic messaging/positioning and landed key press hits for our public launch. ### Software Engineer @ Meta Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | Menlo Park, California, United States Backend engineer working on payments orchestration to enable money movement (while considering risk and compliance requirements) for all products across Meta’s family of apps. I was the domain owner of payment credential authentication; recurring payments (subscriptions); and the core data model powering Facebook Pay. Worked with distributed systems where performance and reliability tradeoffs were frequently required. Mentored a junior engineer. Promoted 8 months after joining the team and received a “Redefines Expectations” rating (top < 5%). ### Contributor @ Forbes Jan 2019 – Jan 2022 Writing founder profiles read by x00,000+; my column involves interviewing founders who built companies worth ~$1 billion+ and sharing how they did it. e.g. Scale AI, Brex, Loom, Confluent, Podium, Stitch Fix, Zoom, Gusto, Webflow, Benchling ### Software Engineer @ Instagram Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | Menlo Park, California, United States Privacy services for the Instagram mobile app and added support for Instagram on Graph API Explorer on Facebook's developer platform ### Product Manager @ Bubble Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | New York, New York, United States Simplifying the tracking of user feedback and feature requests ### Software Engineer @ Zoom Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | San Jose, California, United States Built a Zoom App that allows conference sponsors to gift their attendees ### Software Engineer @ Amazon Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area Semantic search ### Founder @ Medius Ventures Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area Built a multi-six-figure revenue business, launched and grew theRising.co from 0 to 350,000+ annual readers ### Software Engineer @ Capital One Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Urbana, Illinois, United States NLP for financial compliance ## Education ### Bachelor of Science - BS in Computer Science and Statistics University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/levensti --- Source: https://flows.cv/stevenli2 JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/stevenli2/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-29