Who you are hiring
Silent Keel is Zhanyang Li, one senior engineer. UCLA computer science, then four and a half years inside Amazon Web Services building the machinery under Aurora, Amazon's flagship database, and the portals behind AWS Marketplace. Since 2024, AI systems: fine-tuning and serving language models in production, and building the backend of an AI advertising platform. Work happens in English and Chinese.
The record, mapped to the promises
Portals, back office, business processes.
At AWS Marketplace, built the internal portal that let teams launch business processes with automatic and human review steps, cutting process time by about 80 percent, and the federated portal that moved seller onboarding, registration and product security scanning online. A customer portal for your business is this work, sized for you.
Systems that stay up.
Two years on Aurora's distributed storage team in Palo Alto: the data plane that keeps one of the largest database services in the world available. Built the managed failover feature for Aurora Global Database, the mechanism enterprises use to survive the loss of an entire region. Carried the pager, read the core dumps. Operations at $49 a month is this discipline applied to something much smaller.
Data moved between systems without loss.
Designed change-data-capture streaming for Aurora: moving business data between systems without losing or reordering it. Later, a year at a startup building lexi, an AI platform for Meta ad campaigns; the backend, the platform integrations and the LLM interface were mine. The company took the product offline after I left, so the claim is the work, not a link. Connecting the tools you already use is this.
AI in production.
Fine-tuned LLaMA 3 to hold a designed personality in production, and ran the inference fleet that served it, answering in under a second. Built the retrieval layer that mixed document search with embeddings. Writing your system with AI agents under review, and building agents into your workflows when a job calls for it, is this stack pointed at your business.
Websites, catalogues, the front of house.
Full stack throughout: tools product managers used daily, portals used by sellers across a marketplace, and the site you are reading, which is built and run the way yours would be.
Ask the pointed questions
Anything above can be asked about in detail. Write to hello@silentkeel.com, or start a project and ask in the portal.