LLM / VLM engineer · Computational science background

Walker Chi

Walker Chi 迟明远

Building foundation models,
from data to training.

I build the data pipelines, training workflows, and evaluations behind large language and multimodal models. Previously at Moonshot AI and MiniMax; MSc in Computational Science and Engineering from ETH Zürich.

Beyond pretraining, I keep coming back to space elevators, fusion energy, and how we understand and simulate the physical world.

01 / Professional experience

Work & contributions

Full CV ↗

Apr – Sep 2026
Beijing, China

Moonshot AI

Scaling LLM Researcher

  • Pretraining data. Led the end-to-end pipeline across acquisition, crawling, procurement, parsing, and processing; ran multi-epoch and scaling-ladder experiments.
  • Agent evaluation. Contributed seed data, tasks, and agent trajectories to Agent Last Exam (ALE), evaluating planning, reasoning, and execution.
  • GPU compiler capability. Independently built a MiniTriton case study to evaluate kernel generation, correctness, and optimization.

Pretraining · Scaling experiments · Agent evaluation · GPU kernels

Sep 2024 – Apr 2026
Shanghai, China

MiniMax

VLM Researcher

  • M-series model development. Contributed across LLM / VLM data construction, pretraining experiments, hyperparameter search, evaluation, and ablations.
  • Multimodal data at scale. Owned data sourcing, processing, quality control, and delivery. Built TB-to-PB-scale pipelines producing 20T+ interleaved multimodal tokens.
  • Quality & infrastructure. Developed data reward / quality models and ablation workflows; implemented multimodal DPO in Megatron-LM and improved data packing and evaluation scheduling.

LLM / VLM · Data quality modeling · Megatron-LM · Distributed pipelines

Jul – Sep 2021
Shenzhen, China

Tencent

Algorithm Intern · TEG Information Security

  • Graph neural network optimization. Applied sparse computation and JIT compilation to GEN (Graph Estimation Neural Network).
  • Measured improvement. Reduced memory usage to approximately 1/1,000 of the original implementation and accelerated inference by approximately 15×.

Graph neural networks · Sparse computation · JIT

02 / Education

A foundation in computation

2022 – 2024

ETH Zürich

MSc, Computational Science & Engineering

GPA: 5.5 / 6.0
Numerical PDEs, robotics simulation, and sparse attention for LLMs.

2021 – 2022

RWTH Aachen

Exchange Student, Computer Science

An exchange year during my undergraduate studies.

2018 – 2022

HUST

BSc (Honors), Computer Science & Technology

Top 3% in the School of Computer Science · National Scholarship · MCM Finalist.

03 / Writing & curiosity

Beyond the day job

Blog · 20 posts ↗

Space elevators, fusion energy, robotics, quantum physics, and mathematics. Notes from things I have learned and questions I keep asking.

04 / Selected projects & research

Things I build & investigate

All projects ↗