About

Engineering, competition, leadership, theatre, research, and team-building.

Hi, I’m Qikun Liu. I’m a software engineer, but much of my experience has also come from building teams, running organizations, and solving problems that didn’t begin as software projects.

I’m drawn to difficult, messy systems. Sometimes that means a codebase or a product workflow; sometimes it means organizing people, running events, building technical systems, or leading a team from scratch. Across school, work, competitions, research, and community projects, I’ve often ended up in roles where the goal was not just to participate, but to make complicated things work.

Selected Highlights

Full-Stack Engineering

Building internal applications at OptumServe since 2022.

Scholarship

Computer Engineering at UW–Madison with a four-year full-ride award.

Competition

Statewide programming competition first place.

Team Building

Built a CLOL national top 16 collegiate League of Legends team.

Leadership

Organized a four-university U.S. regional debate tournament and led student theatre production.

Product Building

Built an interview management platform for a student organization.

Community

Founded a high school programming club.

I also co-authored an arXiv paper, “FPGA Implementation of Convolutional Neural Network for Real-Time Handwriting Recognition”, which explored hardware implementation of machine learning models on an FPGA for real-time handwritten letter and digit recognition.

I like technical competition, strategic games, team-building, and problems that require both structure and improvisation. I’m especially interested in full-stack and product-focused engineering roles, where requirements often begin as a conversation with the people doing the work rather than a finished specification.

This site covers my projects, resume, and the research and leadership work alongside them.