Hi, I'm Sebastian

I build at the intersection of AR/VR, machine learning, and product.

On my first day at Carnegie Mellon, President Farnam Jahanian told us: “The jobs you’ll be working on in the future don’t exist yet.” I took that literally. I graduated a semester early with a 4.0 in both Information Systems and Statistics & Machine Learning (minors in Game Design and Business), because I wanted range — the kind that lets you make something new when the map doesn’t exist.

I learned to ship with teams first. At Blizzard, I worked on Diablo Immortal, scoping features and aligning art, design, and engineering partners through to delivery. At Tencent and later ByteDance US, I moved upstream, studying markets and competitors, and evaluating studios and titles for investment and licensing. Those projects taught me how to ground product bets with business reality.

I learned to build the stack end-to-end. I’ve shipped full-stack web apps (React, ts, SQL/MongoDB data layers) and made things people can interact with: 4 mobile, 5 PC, and 7 VR games. I also spent time teaching iOS development as a CMU TA and ran AR/VR research in the Augmented Perception Lab, which sharpened my taste for interaction design and human factors.

I learned to read data, and let it change my mind. At Tencent Games, I surfaced 41 behavioral insights from first-party data to inform product decisions. At PNC Bank, I analyzed 300M+ anonymized accounts and improved coupon recommendation accuracy by 12%. Translating messy data into clear narratives is still one of my favorite things to do.

And I learned to build intelligence into products. I’ve designed multi-agent orchestration systems, built complex RAG pipelines, implemented core algorithms from scratch (reinforcement learning, transformer architectures), and fine-tuned large language models. That work gave me a toolkit for building products with intelligence at the core — software that perceives, reasons, and acts.

Today I’m at Apple, pushing the limits of AR/VR and AI/ML. Before that, at Meta Reality Labs, I was part of the core team that turned Connect ’22 into an immersive VR experience. Across roles and companies, my aim stays the same: make powerful technology genuinely helpful — and human.

The best way to predict the future is to build it. If you’re building in this space, I’m always up for a coffee chat. Just drop me a note.

Let's have an adventure!

Other fun stuff I've done:

  • I was the President of the Game Creation Society at CMU, overseeing the development of 3 to 9 games each semester;
  • I was a research assistant at the Augmented Perception Lab at CMU focusing on mixed reality and HCI;
  • I was the research team lead at the Cognitive Development Lab at CMU leading a team of 4 researchers to investigate the cognitive improvement in virtual reality;
  • I had an on-campus job at the Alumni Association and led CMU's official social media initiative in China, a WeChat public account called "CMUNetwork" for three years;
  • I spearheaded a non-profit investment fund to support student startups at CMU's Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Association;
  • I taught a credited course at CMU on how to create games with Unity (98-127) for three semesters and was the teaching assistant for two other courses (67-443, 67-250);
  • I held charity campaigns and fundraisers to keep animals out of circuses, received a letter of appreciation from PETA;
  • I led the organization of a 5-day entrepreneurship summer camp for 100+ high school students, twice;
  • I co-founded a mobile app Transease and won the World Top 50 in Microsoft Imagine Cup;
  • I led the design of a space settlement orbiting Mercury for NASA and won the first prize in China;
  • I was a presenter at both TEDxYouth@YundangLake and TEDxYouth@HuiZhangRd.
Contact Me