I worked as the first full-time hire at Mira (formerly known as Halo), an AI smart glasses startup in San Francisco. We raised $6.6M from General Catalyst, Naval Ravikant, Pillar VC, Soma Capital, and Village Global. I joined at pre-seed and helped scale us to 1,000+ sales.

On the technical side, I built real-time speech-to-text pipelines with WebRTC voice activity detection, deployed self-hosted speech recognition models using TorchServe, and architected the FastAPI backend handling hundreds of concurrent WebSocket connections. I also built our agentic memory system – basically the infrastructure that lets the glasses listen, remember, and actually be useful.

Before that, I worked at the AI Lab at Supercell – the folks behind Brawl Stars, Clash Royale, and Clash of Clans. I built AI-powered NPC dialogue systems that generate branching conversation trees on the fly using LLMs. The NPCs have their own personalities, moods that shift based on context, and can spin up emergent storylines as players interact with them. I built the FastAPI backend with Google GenAI SDK, deployed it serverless on AWS Lambda, and integrated everything with Unity C# game clients so conversations happen in real-time as you play.

For undergrad, I studied at the University of Michigan, majoring in Computer Science. I was affiliated to the Honors Program at the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA).

🔗 You can find my social media accounts here at my Linktree.

📢 Feel free to drop me an email at charliezhang325@gmail.com. I’m always open to chats and feedbacks.

🎨 View my Chinese calligraphy and photography works here!