About

Hi, I'm Esther Jun Kim. I build for a living and for fun.

I've spent most of my career working at the intersection of people and technology. Nowadays, as co-founder of an AI startup, my target users include agents, not just people. Designing for both has meant rethinking how I approach software from the ground up.

A few things I've done:

• I led US engineering at Riiid, an AI EdTech startup that raised $175M from SoftBank Vision Fund 2
• I have 3 patents from my work at Samsung, Intel, and Volkswagen
• I've open-sourced side projects (primarily in IoT and computer vision), with 900+ stars GitHub and 140,000+ views on YouTube
• I received my PhD in HCI from Purdue and MEng/BS degrees in ECE from Cornell

For me, understanding comes from building. Even in the age of AI, there's no substitute for wrestling with a problem yourself. This site is where I document what I'm learning along the way.