MP

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

Plate I — The fleet, surveyedDrawn in your browser, at your arrivalN = 06
I

The Record

Curriculum Vitae — Seattle, WA
8 yrsdistributed backend & AI infrastructure on AWS
Multi-tenantdesigned & own the LLM-serving platform for GenAI translation
Multi-regionreal-time LLM translation serving in production
MCPreusable AI-agent infrastructure adopted across teams
01

Summary

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.

02

Experience

Software Engineer, Amazon

Jun 2021 — Present

Customer 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 2021

U.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.
03

Skills

AI / LLM Systems

multi-tenant LLM servingBedrock Guardrailsproduction evalschrF++ / COMET / LLM-as-judgeprompt rolloutMCP / FastMCPAWS BedrockSageMaker

Distributed Systems & Cloud

ECS/FargateLambdaDynamoDBAurora/RDSStep FunctionsCloudWatchCDKevent-driven architecturesmulti-regionobservabilityincident response

Languages

PythonJavaTypeScriptJavaScriptSQLPerlShell
04

Education

Rice University — M.S. in Geophysics

Jul 2016 — May 2018 · Houston, TX

Yangtze University — B.Eng.

Aug 2012 — Jun 2016 · Hubei, China

05

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.
II

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 ↗
III

The Writings

Field notes — Substack ↗ · RSS
2026-08-24

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.

6 min read
2026-08-20

A 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.

10 min read
2026-08-10

Why 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.

5 min read
2026-08-08

Why 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.

5 min read
2026-07-24

finance-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.

3 min read
2026-07-24

How 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.

5 min read
2026-07-24

Persona-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.

4 min read
2026-07-24

Valhalla: 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.

3 min read
2026-07-20

Three 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.

7 min read
2026-06-01

Anti-Engagement AI: Software You Can Walk Away From

As AI makes infinite engagement easier, the better product bet may be software that respects absence.

Substack ↗
2026-06-01

ThreadLang: 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.

4 min read