Justin Lin

Before IMC, I was an intern at Tesla for 2 co-op terms. During my second internship, I spearheaded the development of a generalized CAD validation engine. During my first internship, I worked on 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).