Skip to content
Zach Lichtman
Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, and Robotics.I build things that I wish existed.
Résumé

Experience

Hyundai America Technical Center, Inc.

Hyundai Research & Development

AI Engineering Intern | ISW & DevOps

May – Aug 2026

Genesis SUV at dusk

Partnered with Amazon’s voice team on production integration and pre-release validation of in-vehicle voice features.

VERDICT

Scorers
31
Dimensions
98

My intern project: an evaluation harness that assesses whether production voice assistants are ready to ship in vehicles.

Earned adoption and support from Red Hat for use by multiple carmakers.

DevOps

Engineers
1,000+

Contributed to HATCI’s OpenShift development platform for engineers across Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis.

JumpstarterAutomating hardware-in-the-loop testing.

Technical Details & Collaboration

Evaluation & Hardware

  • Drives multi-turn spoken conversations with frontier in-vehicle models, including a head unit leased through Jumpstarter.
  • Grades every turn with 31 scorers across 98 dimensions, from deterministic checks to Prometheus-2, G-Eval, and FLASK judges.
  • Decides via adaptive resampling, cluster-robust bootstrap, and equivalence tests against preregistered margins; refuses without evidence.

Platform & Collaboration

  • Automated hardware testing, CI pipelines, and GitOps delivery: Tekton CI with Argo CD and Ansible, Cuttlefish device emulation, and Yocto embedded Linux build/debug tooling.
  • 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.

Cybersecurity Researcher

  • Identified and responsibly disclosed an IDOR (insecure direct object reference) vulnerability in OpenAI's ChatGPT.
  • Identified and responsibly disclosed a privilege escalation vulnerability in Meta's Instagram.