Systems
- macOS
- Linux (Debian)
- Yocto embedded Linux
Member of Technical Staff Intern at HATCI
Zach Lichtman
Infotainment DevOps & Production Software
I build the thing I wanted to exist, then make sure it actually works. Right now that means deciding whether a voice assistant is safe to ship to millions of cars.
Tools I use
Languages
- Swift
- Python
- C/C++
- Rust
- Java
- TypeScript
- HTML/CSS
AI / ML
- Claude & Codex SDKs
- PyTorch
- Hugging Face (LeRobot/ACT)
- MONAI
- Kubeflow
AI Safety
Technical Fellow, Wisconsin AI Safety Initiative- Alignment
- Interpretability
- Evals & Red-Teaming
Cybersecurity
Northwestern CTD- Kali Linux
- Penetration Testing
- Web Exploitation
- Network Security
- Auth0
- Burp Suite
Frontend & Design
- React
- Next.js
- PatternFly
- Tailwind
- Vercel
- Mapbox
- Figma
- Adobe CC
- Blender
- Lucid
Backend & DevOps
- Spring Boot
- Supabase
- Tekton
- Argo CD
- GitLab
- JFrog
- Xcode
- Git
- Jira
- Notion
Cloud & Infra
- AWS
- Docker
- OpenShift
- Kubernetes
- Knative
- Ansible
- Perses
Spoken
- English
- Spanish
Education
University of Wisconsin Madison
B.S. in Computer Science
Artificial IntelligenceData Structures & AlgorithmsDiscrete MathematicsComputer Engineering
Case study 01 · Experience · 2026
Hyundai · HATCI
Member of Technical Staff InternInfotainment DevOps & Production Software
HATCI is Hyundai Motor Group's R&D center in the U.S., where Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis engineer what ends up in the car. I work on the tooling that decides whether it is safe to ship.
- Scorers
- 28
- Eval channels
- 04
- Engineers
- 1,000+
- Vehicle brands
- 03
VERDICT
Architected VERDICT, the evaluation harness HATCI uses to decide whether a production LLM voice assistant is safe to ship to millions of vehicles. It conducts multi-turn spoken conversations and grades each assistant with 28 scorers across semantic, acoustic, interactional, and stability channels—from deterministic assertions to Prometheus-2, G-Eval, and FLASK judges. Red Hat adopted it into its Automotive Suite for use by other carmakers.
Multi-turn speech
Assistant response
Four-channel scoring
Ship verdict
Prometheus-2G-EvalFLASK
Developer infrastructure
Building the Red Hat OpenShift platform that standardizes infotainment software development for 1,000+ engineers across Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis's global R&D network, including distributed hardware-in-the-loop testing, Cuttlefish device emulation, Tekton CI, GitOps delivery with Argo CD and Ansible, and embedded Linux build and debug tooling.
Research partnerships
Partnered with Amazon's voice team and Michigan State University researchers on production integration and pre-release validation of in-vehicle voice features.
Open source
Problems I hit, and engineered away
PowderMeet
Why I built it
A winter-break problem no app could answer: where should two skiers separated across a mountain meet?
Watch demo & details
Heartable
Why I built it
Built for cross-library control: one master music library across Spotify, Apple Music, and more; mixtape-style playback; and portable backups that survive a service or account change.
Further info
MacSpaces
Why I built it
A native macOS menu-bar app that turns the MacBook notch into a live control surface and adds a customizable widget dock.
Further info
Robotics
Teaching hands to move, and rovers to know where they are
AI/ML Engineer, AlohaMini
Teleoperation data collection and imitation-learning policy training (Hugging Face LeRobot, ACT) for the AlohaMini dexterous hand.
Contributed stale observation detection and logging to the LeKiwi client to surface dropped frames during data collection.
Software Engineer, GNSS Navigation
Validated GNSS navigation code for the club's autonomous rover, field-testing across varied terrain and signal conditions.
AI safety
Making models safe, and teaching people to
Safety Scholar
Conducts collaborative AI-safety research, backed by awarded model API credits and research resources (20+ papers published org-wide).
AI Enablement & Training
Authored the team's technical training materials on AI development and AI safety, then co-taught engineers to use the tooling properly: agentic loops, agents, and evaluation practice with safety in mind.
Selected contributions
More work, in context
Consulting, open-source contributions, security research, hackathons, writing, and the communities I help build.
Consulting
Brainsprout & Raden Wellness
AI Engineering Healthcare Consultant
Built PyTorch/MONAI pipelines that render anatomically accurate 3D brain models, used for neurosurgical education and expert testimony at Brainsprout (led by Dr. Michael Walsh, Head of Neurosurgery at Northwestern Medicine).
Guiding AI feature decisions and HIPAA-compliant data handling for Raden Wellness's health platform.
JRNL-iOS
Contributor on alichtman/jrnl-ios
Contributor to an encrypted, git-backed journaling iOS app. Shipped Time Machine, a per-entry commit-history browser that reconstructs entry state at any commit via libgit2 blob reads, and bridged Clibgit2 push/fetch/merge into reusable Swift Repository extensions.
Built the GitProviderForPAT protocol family, unifying GitHub, GitLab, and self-hosted PAT sign-in behind one Swift interface.
Independent Bug Bounty
Cybersecurity Researcher
Identified and responsibly disclosed an IDOR (insecure direct object reference) vulnerability in OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Used Burp Suite and other penetration-testing tools for web exploitation and vulnerability research.