Bill Qian

is a student, always a student

Notes on ML, systems, art, and the stuff in between

This site is a calm place for projects, small experiments, and occasional long-form thoughts.

About

Hi, I'm Bill! I am a fourth year student at Yale studying Computer Science and Applied Math. I love learning and doing things (heh), and subsequently writing down what I figure out along the way. These days I'm mostly exploring distributed systems for ML, math, music, and film production.

This site is a scrapbook of projects and notes—some polished, some that look like they could have been from my middle school days. But I promise they are all interesting! At least, interesting to me when I first started them.

Contact

GitHub

Experience

Software Engineering Intern

Citadel Securities

Miami, FL

Working on distributed networking systems in C++. Learning a lot about performance, reliability, and the trade-offs that matter in production.

Jun. 2025 -- Present

C++Distributed SystemsHigh-Performance ComputingTrading Systems

Research Assistant

Quanquan Liu Laboratory, Yale University

New Haven, CT

Experimenting with GPU-based graph algorithms and distributed compute. A lot of time spent making things go fast (and debugging when they don't).

Apr. 2025 -- Present

GPU ComputingGraph AlgorithmsDistributed ComputingC++CUDA

R&D Software Engineering Intern

The New York Times

New York City, NY

Built tooling around LLMs for tagging and proofreading, and shipped infra on GCP that handled real traffic. Lots of learning about data, latency, and making models useful.

Jun. 2024 -- Nov. 2024

AI/MLOpenAI APISpaCyLLMGCPFirestorePython

Research Assistant

Gerstein Laboratory, Yale University

New Haven, CT

Built a distributed training stack across cloud and clusters with NCCL/Kubernetes/PyTorch. Also worked on LLM training/eval and some low-level optimizations on Metal/CUDA.

Dec. 2022 -- Present

Distributed MLAWSAzureKubernetesPyTorchCUDAResearch

Software Engineering Intern

Thomas Ho Company Ltd.

New York City, NY

Applied neural nets to evaluate a pricing model. Early project that got me interested in practical ML and careful evaluation.

Jun. 2021 -- Aug. 2021

PythonTensorFlowNeural NetworksFinancial ModelingResearch

Projects

ToolLLM

Exploring how LLMs can use large toolsets in the real world. Worked on methods and open-source infra with collaborators.

LLMAPIsResearchICLR 2024WeChat AI

BioCoder

A benchmark for bioinformatics code generation. Built tooling, datasets, and distributed evaluation harness.

BioinformaticsCode GenerationResearchISMB 2024Google DeepMind

C4 Detect Fault Detection/Recovery

A distributed fault tolerance stack across cloud and clusters, built using NCCL/Gloo/Kubernetes/PyTorch. Reimplementation of the C4 paper.

Distributed MLAWSAzureKubernetesPyTorchNCCL

Say hello

I'm happy to chat about projects, share notes, or swap stories about things you're building.

Response time

Usually within a day