Kevin Ko
AI Research Engineer at Upstage
Seoul, South Korea
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKevin Ko is an AI research engineer with nine years of experience building and scaling large language models, currently focusing on LLM post-training and agentic capabilities at Upstage. He has led pre-training and post-training efforts across Kakao, Kakao Brain, and EleutherAI, driving projects like Polyglot-Ko and Kanana that achieved performance comparable to much larger models. A prolific open-source maintainer, Kevin created widely used tools including Transformer (4k+ stars), Pororo, KoChat, and Parallelformers—work that spans model implementation, deployment, and Korean-language NLP utilities. He combines deep systems expertise (Megatron, DeepSpeed, TP/PP optimizations, OSLO) with hands-on engineering from serving optimized models in production (ONNX/TensorRT, Triton). Beyond code, he publishes papers and technical write-ups and organizes community learning through talks and manager roles in Korean NLP groups. His background in software engineering and consistent open-source impact make him a bridge between research, tooling, and practical LLM deployment.
9 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
학사, Software Engineering, 학사, Software Engineering at Jeonbuk National University
Korean, English
Github Skills (11)
paypal8
parser7
java6
statement6
hierarchy6
oracle4
mysql4
postgresql4
sql4
jsqlparser1
visitor-pattern1
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
siryeong/youth-hanshin
Mar 2025 - Jan 2026
Contributions:7 releases, 20 PRs, 37 pushes in 10 months
Siryeong/spring-roomesacpe-reservation-kakao
Jan 2023 - Jan 2023
Contributions:42 commits, 2 PRs, 6 pushes in 6 days
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