A living document — the record of one engineer
Minglong Pan
AI Platform Engineer
Production AI infrastructure for real-time GenAI translation at Amazon — and after hours, an agentic fleet of my own. This document is maintained by that fleet.
Set by the fleet — how it runs
The Record
Curriculum Vitae — Seattle, WASummary
Software engineer building production AI infrastructure for large-scale, customer-facing systems. I own multi-tenant LLM serving, model guardrails, and rollout infrastructure for real-time GenAI translation at Amazon, serving many languages across multiple regions. ~8 years building distributed backend systems across AWS, production operations, and large-scale data processing.
Experience
Software Engineer, Amazon
Jun 2021 — PresentCustomer Service · GenAI Translation · Chat Infrastructure
AI Platform & Multi-Tenant LLM Serving
- Designed and own multi-tenant LLM serving for real-time GenAI translation on AWS Bedrock — automated tenant onboarding, request routing, and per-tenant cost tracking across regions, with faster tenant onboarding and improved serving efficiency at production scale.
- Built the multi-tenant serving and staged-rollout infrastructure used to migrate production traffic from legacy machine translation to GenAI translation on Bedrock — eval-gated dial-up rollouts across many languages and regions.
- Built a persona-routed MCP server framework (Python FastMCP, stdio) on Anthropic's Model Context Protocol — semantic routing of tasks to persona → skills → tools, with team resource packages and per-team JSON config; adopted by peer teams without forking shared infrastructure.
- Built MCP-based internal AI agents for developer-productivity and incident-response workflows.
- Led an enterprise onboarding across European and Japanese marketplaces — large-scale terminology and multilingual configuration, delivered as a staged production change.
Inference Reliability, Safety & Cost Optimization
- Built guardrails on AWS Bedrock for the GenAI translation stack, screening model output before it reaches customers; extended the translation evaluation framework with standard MT-quality metrics (chrF++, COMET) and LLM-as-judge meaning-preservation checks.
- Built a direction-aware SageMaker scaling tool with dry-run and rollback that significantly right-sized GenAI inference capacity during the MT→GenAI cutover, materially cutting compute cost.
- Built staged prompt-rollout controls with a safe kill-switch and per-tenant gating; hardened batch inference with retry/backoff and concurrency limits for reliability under throttling.
Distributed Platform Engineering & Migrations
- Migrated a regional voice channel to Amazon Connect — resolved cross-region TLS and IAM integration challenges and coordinated multiple partner teams to bring customer-service agents online at scale.
- Migrated a core chat service to a container-based architecture on ECS/Fargate; built load- and stress-testing infrastructure for active chat monitoring, throttling, and persistence across regions.
- Led the cross-organization transfer of a suite of chat services between engineering teams — authored knowledge-transfer documentation and ramped the receiving team with no major operational incidents.
Technical Communication
- Authored internal engineering write-ups on AI developer tooling and MCP-based workflows to socialize reusable AI-infrastructure patterns across teams.
Software Engineer, Viridien (formerly CGG Geophysics)
Jun 2018 — Jun 2021U.S. Seismic Imaging Department · 3D subsurface imaging workflows for major Oil & Gas clients
- Built signal-processing and seismic-imaging pipelines in Perl / Java / Python — Fourier transform, Tau-P transform, filter design — on petabyte-scale seismic data spanning 120+ km³ subsurface volume; improved image SNR by 5+ dB.
- Developed tree-based classification algorithm in Java and released to production; improved workflow throughput, contributing to major proprietary client engagements.
Skills
AI / LLM Systems
Distributed Systems & Cloud
Languages
Education
Rice University — M.S. in Geophysics
Jul 2016 — May 2018 · Houston, TX
Yangtze University — B.Eng.
Aug 2012 — Jun 2016 · Hubei, China
Research & Publications
- Co-author, Geophysical Research Letters (Carlson et al., 2021) — "Impacts of engineered diversions and natural avulsions on delta-lobe stability." doi:10.1029/2021GL092438
- Presentations at American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting (2019, 2021) on channel diversion characteristics and delta-lobe stability.
The Index
Eight live systems — see Plate I- N-01paws Live demoA shared ambient digital pet for two humans — FastAPI + WebSocket + LLM behavior layered with hand-written quirks. Live with real users; guests can watch the demo dog read-only.paws.fly.dev ↗
- N-02ThreadLang OSS · PyPIA compact DSL and single-node runtime for bounded, traceable LLM workflows — grammar → frozen-dataclass AST → deterministic runtime with durable runs, contracts, and replay. Published on PyPI, v0.13.GitHub ↗
- N-03finance-os PrivateA personal investment platform: a ~70-name universe scored on 11 LLM-graded dimensions, with kill-trigger monitors and daily Telegram alerts.Design notes →
- N-04Valhalla Personal OSThe operations layer for the fleet — agents post only what needs a decision to one attention feed, over a shared knowledge memory. Private by design.Design notes →
- N-05Persona-routed MCP PatternA persona-routed stdio MCP server — a semantic router maps the task or todos to persona → skills → tools, auto-loading team resource packages; team behavior lives in its own JSON config. Adopted across teams without forking shared infrastructure.Pattern note →
- N-06Agent fleet FleetA personal fleet of AI agents on Telegram — runtime-agnostic by design: Claude Code, Hermes, Codex, and Kimi are interchangeable labor. They built and run much of the above — including this document.How it's run →
- N-07woolroom OSSThe public engine extraction of paws — room runtime, mood and memory machinery, realtime sync, and the deterministic response engine from the essay, with a demo content pack. MIT, self-hostable.GitHub ↗
- N-08agent-usage-manager OSShtop for AI agents — liveness, CPU/RAM/GPU usage, and a kill switch for headless agents: OpenClaw, Hermes, Ollama, vLLM, Claude Code.GitHub ↗
Why I capped my AI approval queue at 5 decisions, not more
Human approval is a capacity-constrained service, so I cap my remote AI decision docket at five and drain the backlog in focused review sessions.
2026-08-20A coherent virtual pet without an LLM
Coherence in an ambient pet comes from explicit state, bounded choices, and reliable fallbacks — not from generating every line at runtime. The pattern: a two-axis mood lattice, an authored phrasebook with a strict fallback order, event-indexed selection, a conservative intent classifier, and a validator-gated LLM lane that can only ever audition.
2026-08-10Why tmux is the wrong IPC layer for an agent fleet
Ten times in eighteen days I pasted one AI agent's output into another agent's window. There is no wire between them. The wire is me.
2026-08-08Why a self-improving agent's accept rate isn't a quality metric
My eval gate scored a byte-identical file 0.167 better than itself and approved it. The number I trusted for months only recorded my own approvals.
2026-07-24finance-os: a decision system, not a stock picker
A personal investment platform that scores a ~70-name universe on 11 LLM-graded dimensions, blends probability-weighted scenarios, and treats the kill trigger as a first-class object — the design notes.
2026-07-24How I run a personal agent fleet
Runtime-agnostic agents on Telegram — Claude Code, Hermes, Codex, Kimi as interchangeable labor — with a shared knowledge memory, cron-driven loops, and a rule that everything the fleet ships gets verified before it's claimed.
2026-07-24Persona-routed agent tooling: one stdio server, every team's capabilities
A semantic router that reads the task or todo list, routes to persona → skills → tools, and auto-loads team resource packages — one stdio binary that works with any CLI or agentic tooling, with team behavior living in its own JSON config.
2026-07-24Valhalla: an attention layer for a fleet of agents
The operations layer for my agent fleet — agents post only what needs a decision to one attention feed, over a shared knowledge memory. Design notes on exception-driven surfaces and the four friction laws.
2026-07-20Three agent frameworks converged on a control-plane protocol this month. I run my fleet on tmux and chose not to adopt it.
Three frameworks shipped the same control-plane idea in a month — external process control, capability negotiation, env-var hygiene. What converged, why my tmux fleet already has the failure modes it solves priced in, and the two concrete triggers that would make me adopt it.
2026-06-01Anti-Engagement AI: Software You Can Walk Away From
As AI makes infinite engagement easier, the better product bet may be software that respects absence.
2026-06-01ThreadLang: a deterministic DSL for LLM workflows
Most multi-step LLM code is prompt strings glued together in a Python function. ThreadLang makes the workflow the program — a grammar, an AST, and a structured trace you can run without a network call.