Hongming Zhao

AI engineer in Singapore. Nine years building production systems in regulated banking (OCBC, Trust Bank, DBS), now building multi-agent LLM systems end to end.

I build evaluation in from the start: golden sets, multi-model comparison, and designing for failure modes instead of assuming model output is correct.

Contact

hi@xploreurself.comgithub.com/hongming-githublinkedin.com/in/hongming-zhao

Selected Work

Adversarial Robustness Harness

A red team and a blue team co-evolve against a frozen model, producing a measurable robustness curve.

ASR@3 (n=5)20% → 0%benign false refusal (n=10)10% → 30%
PythonLangGraph
Read the write-upGitHub

Job Hunt Agent

LangGraph supervisor coordinating narrow LLM specialists over ~2,000 job listings a day.

output tokens−61%prompt cache hit (warm)95.8%prompt cache hit (real batches)~18%
LangGraph
Read the write-up
Code private.

AI Detective

RAG over an adversarial corpus where three of eight documents are topical decoys, so similarity search actively misleads.

distractor exclusion (n=5)0.92–1.00hardest query fails25–55%
RAG
Read the write-upGitHub

AI Usage

macOS menu bar app for Claude subscription quota, reading the desktop app's own cookie store.

macOS
GitHub

What to Eat

Weekend dinner decisions for two people. My first TypeScript project, built to learn Next.js.

Next.jsTypeScript
Live
Code private.

Notes

LangGraph Durable Execution

A ground-up explanation of how LangGraph persists state, resumes work, travels through time, handles parallel writes, and supports human-in-the-loop.

Read the write-up
2026-08-04

Two Kinds of LLM Caching, and When Each One Actually Fires

Prompt caching and response caching solve different problems, and both fire under narrower conditions than the marketing suggests. One of my own tests could only ever report zero.

Read the write-up
2026-08-09

Where the bottleneck went

A 3G fibre plan that topped out at 940 Mbps, and where the bottleneck moved each time I removed one: the WAN port, the phones' radios, a crowded channel, a gigabit cable, and an access point that wasn't configured the way its app said.

Read the write-up
2026-09-28

Experience

2026-03 – 2026-08

ST Engineering · AI Engineer Intern

Let non-technical users drive 6 existing AI microservices via natural language; LangGraph intent routing plus a versioned evaluation harness.

2024-10 – 2025-08

DBS Bank · Tech Lead

Led a team of 4 delivering a pre-trade check engine across 4 regional banking systems, end to end from requirements to production.

2023-04 – 2024-09

Trust Bank Singapore · Senior Backend Engineer

Decoupled services with an event-driven architecture; built a production log monitoring dashboard; mentored new hires and ran code reviews.

2019-03 – 2023-03

OCBC Bank · API Developer

Primary technical point of contact for the OCBC Enterprise API platform, onboarding dozens of enterprise partners across 4 regions.

2017-07 – 2019-02

Avanade · Software Engineer

Government project; built RESTful services with Spring / Spring Data JPA.

2016-10 – 2017-03

OCBC Bank · API Developer Intern

Open API platform; customized OAuth2 flows.

Education

National University of Singapore — MTech, Artificial Intelligence Systems (2025 – Present)

National University of Singapore — Graduate Diploma, Systems Analysis (2016 – 2017)

Zhejiang University of Technology — BEng, Computer Science / Digital Media Technology (2012 – 2016)