Justin Lin

I just wrapped up my second software engineering internship at Tesla, where I spearheaded the development of a generalized CAD validation engine. During the design phase of products/manufacturing lines, engineers often need to verify repetitive but critical standards in CAD designs (e.g. "Are all marked points structurally supported by a matching pin?"). My project employed multi-core parallelism, purpose-built parsers for .STEP/.STP, and techniques from linear algebra to efficiently and correctly perform this geometric analysis.

I also designed a client/server/executor architecture to improve the reliability of the tool and meet demand from engineers. The end result was a production application where engineers could drag & drop a CAD file, view a 3D summary of validation results in the original coordinate space, and export tasks to address each design issue — without ever leaving a web browser.

During my first internship at Tesla, I worked on data pipelines and software for the web. My project involved building an agentic search engine for many different data sources across the company (think Perplexity or Notion AI, but for Tesla). I also got the chance to own the development of a new application for Quality Engineers, which displays the genealogy of parts inside of any Tesla vehicle.

I previously interned at Zynga Inc twice, as a Data Engineer and Backend Engineer. I worked on data pipelines that could scale to millions of daily events using tech like Kafka and Spark. I also built infrastructure that Zynga uses to observe its large machine learning models in production. Finally, I wrote Go/gRPC code for low-latency services in Zynga Poker.

In 2024, I co-founded Waterloo Reality Labs. It's probably the coolest thing I've ever done. As Software Lead, I directed the development of on-device AI models for hand pose recognition. As a wider team, we're trying to build a humanoid robot and VR headsets from scratch. Our team consists of 30-40 student engineers, and we even hire full-time interns.

In 2023, I received top awards at Hack the North and HackWestern. I was also previously a Workshop Lead at Hack the North.

In 2022, I began my degree at UWaterloo. I also started my YouTube channel, which a lot of new SE students seem to ask me about :D

I was formerly the president of the Software Engineering Society during the 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 academic years.

I'm a friend of Socratica, and you can find me spending my weekends there.

Contact me if you're interested in what I do! I'm especially down to chat if you're intrigued by the work we do at Reality Labs. Comms are also always open to SEs who have program concerns or who are stressed & lost (I've been there too).