Mengchao Ren
Software Engineer · M.S. Software Engineering @ CMU Silicon Valley
Software Engineer and M.S. candidate in Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley, with experience building reliable, scalable systems across the full stack.
Get in TouchWork Experience
Analytics 4 Everyone
AI Engineering Intern
Jun 2026 — Sep 2026- Contributed to CognGPT, an AI education platform integrating with Canvas Learning Management System, owning the Canvas integration layer across a Django REST backend, React frontend, and search service - spanning LTI 1.3 launch and OAuth credentialing, course and material synchronization, term management, and multi-university tenant isolation for instructor and student workflows
- Redesigned multi-university tenant resolution for cloud-hosted Canvas, where universities share one LTI issuer, anchoring tenant identity on validated LTI client_id claims mapped to a university registry; eliminated 5 hostname/claim inference paths, unified 11 call sites behind one fail-closed resolver, and reduced new-university onboarding to data entry with zero code changes
- Engineered atomic Canvas course re-synchronization that detects renames and recodes, rejects ambiguous course keys in one transaction, backfills owner-scoped materials, and adds React registration flows for custom term selection and renamed-course re-confirmation, keeping instructor course data consistent across sync cycles
- Replaced per-request database connection handling with budgeted PostgreSQL pooling across the core API and search services, returning deterministic 503 responses on capacity exhaustion instead of unbounded connection growth, verified by 76 automated tests covering pool lifecycle, consumer cleanup, and capacity failure paths
HRO China-Key
Founding Engineer
Jun 2026 — Sep 2026- Designed and shipped a project management system from scratch that grew into a modular internal operations platform scaling toward 1,000 employees' daily workflows across project management, HR, seal approval, finance, and property operations - 5 business modules, ~800 REST endpoints, real-time WebSocket notifications across 160+ event types, and ~500K lines of code delivered through 330+ pull requests in three months, running in production on self-hosted infrastructure
- Architected the finance core running the production ledgers of 8 operating companies - bank-statement import with fingerprint-based deduplication and auto-classification, an open-scope reconciliation engine, a role × department × company permission model with capability bits, dual-period management/statutory P&L reporting, and a multi-leg double-entry voucher engine with database-level integrity constraints shipped behind a feature flag - tracking ¥110M+ (~$15M) in receivables and ¥78M in banking flows, plus 6,000+ historical journal rows migrated under debit-credit validation
- Integrated a third-party e-invoicing gateway with reliability-first design - RSA-signed transport, a fail-closed callback shield with IP allowlisting, payload deduplication, and idempotent acknowledgements, plus transactional outbox dispatch with dead-letter replay - issuing production e-invoices through a fully audited pipeline; embedded OCR and LLM steps into approval workflows for contract-field extraction, per-attachment risk summaries, and email-intent classification driving offer state machines while cutting the OCR service image from 15GB to ~1GB
- Ran delivery as an AI-native engineering organization: orchestrated 4 parallel Claude Code agent lines plus Codex under a supervisor thread with a written decision log, enforced by per-worktree isolated Docker stacks, migration-number gates with pre-push hooks, and mandatory real-browser E2E before merge - sustaining 330+ pull requests and 4,900+ pytest cases as the sole human reviewer
HireBeat
Software Engineering Intern
Jun 2025 — Aug 2025- Contributed to a multi-tenant AI workflow platform built with Django, Next.js, Redis, Docker, and Stripe, developing core product infrastructure across user onboarding, tenant administration, real-time workflow visibility, and local developer setup
- Engineered five user onboarding and access flows, including signup, email confirmation, login, JWT cookie refresh, and Google SSO, improving authentication reliability and reducing friction for new tenant users
- Built tenant-scoped real-time notification workflows using Django Channels, Redis, bulk fan-out, 3 role-based recipient types, and per-user read tracking, enabling users to monitor workflow events as they occurred
- Automated a one-command Docker bootstrap for 5 services, 4 seeded accounts, 1 sample organization tenant, and Stripe test data, while refining React/MUI member-management flows for invite, role update, and removal actions
Digital China
Software Engineering Intern
Dec 2023 — Feb 2024- Built REST APIs in Python with Flask for internal cloud monitoring tools, reducing incident response time by 15%
- Integrated AWS S3 with on-premise storage to handle 50K+ daily logs for enterprise data pipelines
- Developed React dashboards for Smart Vision platform, enabling 20+ product teams to track model versions and usage
- Optimized MySQL schemas for user management and access control, improving query performance by 25%
CommVerge Solutions
Software Engineering Intern
Jul 2023 — Sep 2023- Built a Vue.js component for video watermarks, integrated with REST APIs and a Node.js utility service
- Created a validation dashboard with interactive UI, grid previews, and dynamic player management for watermark QA
- Contributed to a Chrome extension with cross-browser watermarking and customizable UI skins
China Telecom Corporation
Software Development Intern
May 2023 — Jul 2023- Built full-stack refund auditing platform handling 5,000+ monthly cases using Vue.js frontend and Java Spring Boot backend
- Optimized MySQL queries, improving report generation speed by 25%
- Deployed services on Linux servers with Docker, cutting downtime by 15%
Johns Hopkins University
Research Assistant
Jul 2024 — Oct 2024- Conducted comparative analysis of Transformer, GPT, and BERT architectures for sentiment analysis, NER, and QA tasks
- Investigated computational efficiency and bias mitigation, proposing optimization strategies with measured trade-offs
- Authored final report and presented findings at an academic seminar under Prof. Philipp Koehn
Featured Projects
About Me
Hi, I'm Mengchao Ren, a Software Engineer and M.S. candidate in Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley. I build reliable, scalable systems across the full stack, with hands-on experience in backend services, authentication flows, distributed systems, and data-driven applications.
I've worked on production systems in both startup and enterprise environments, contributing to projects involving Django and Flask backends, real-time communication with Redis and WebSockets, cloud deployments on AWS, and modern frontend frameworks such as React and Vue. My work often focuses on improving system robustness, performance, and developer efficiency.
Beyond engineering practice, I have a strong interest in applied machine learning and natural language processing. I've conducted research on large language models, analyzing their performance, efficiency, and limitations across real-world NLP tasks. I enjoy working at the intersection of engineering rigor and practical impact, turning complex problems into maintainable solutions.
