Repositioning as AI/ML Engineer | Generated by AI

Home 2026.07

Good call. You’re right — the resume as written reads “backend engineer who also tinkers with AI,” and that’s the single biggest drag on your market position.

Here’s exactly what I’d change, section by section, keeping every line of existing content. The operation is: reorder, retitle, and reweight — no deletions, no fabrications.

1. Retitle the whole document

Current: “Resume” Change to: Zhiwei Li — AI Engineer / ML Engineer

Your current title reads generic. Leading with the target role signals to the 30-second scanner what bucket to put you in. Keep “Full Stack Engineer / Staff Engineer” in the position list at the bottom — this is just the header.

2. Profile section: rewrite the lead paragraph

Current (what recruiters see first):

Male, born in 1995, Chinese citizen, resides in Guangzhou. Achieved top 300 in Guangdong NOIP 2011…

Problem: the first thing a hiring manager reads is your birth year, citizenship, and a high school competition from 14 years ago. Your AI work is buried 10 paragraphs down.

Suggested restructure — group the profile into three clusters, with AI first:

Cluster 1 — AI/ML identity (lead):

Self-taught AI Engineer with hands-on GPT-2 training from scratch (124M→760M parameters) on H200 (141GB HBM3e), AMD MI300X (192GB HBM3), and RTX 4070 (12GB) GPUs. Trained and evaluated models on FineWeb (10B+ tokens) and custom datasets. Published SEC-EDGAR-GPT (nanoGPT trained on SEC filings). ~3B LLM tokens consumed, ~15 small models trained, ~200 GPU-hours across three architectures. Built terminal AI agents (iclaw, ww) and LLM-powered developer tooling used daily.

Cluster 2 — Engineering identity (what you actually get paid for):

11 years professional engineering experience across mobile (iOS/Android), backend (Java, Spring, Python), and full-stack development. Currently AI Full Stack Engineer at TEKsystems (HSBC Bank). Previous: LeanCloud, founded a startup (Fun Live, 30K users, ¥3M revenue), Square Root, DBS Bank. Top 6% Copilot usage internally at HSBC.

Cluster 3 — Personal context (lower weight):

Male, born 1995, Guangzhou. Self-taught (dropped out of Beijing Forestry University, pursuing associate degree). NOIP top 300. IELTS 6.5. ~400 blog posts, ~75K monthly page views, ~8,000 AI notes.

The birth year, dropout status, and high school competition are NOT deleted — they just drop to third priority, after the two things that actually get you hired.

3. Work Experience: rename your current role

Current:

TEKsystems, AI Full Stack Engineer (Outsourced to HSBC Bank), 2025.02 - Present

This is good (you already put “AI” in the title — that’s correct). But the description buries your AI work in the last bullet. Move the AI narrative to bullet #1:

Suggested order for bullets:

  1. Lead with AI usage: “Ranked top 6% in Copilot usage at HSBC globally (premium requests metric). Built 20 specialized agents, 400 reusable Copilot-generated scripts, and an automated test pipeline generating ~70 AI-assisted test cases. Engineered caching, validation, and prompt pipelines for LLM outputs to make AI tooling reliable in a regulated banking environment.”

  2. Then banking platform context: “Specialist Engineering title, building the Finance Transformation Platform — finance adjustments, journal-level controls, import/validation/export, submission/approval workflows.”

  3. Then tech stack / lifecycle: “Java, Spring, IBM Db2, Angular, Python, Ansible, Jenkins, WebSphere Liberty — full lifecycle from dev through UAT to production.”

This way the recruiter sees “AI-first engineer working in a bank” instead of “bank engineer who also uses Copilot.”

4. AI Projects section promotion

Your AI Projects section is currently the best content on your resume but it’s buried under Projects, after corporate projects. Two options:

Option A (stronger): Move AI Projects UP, right after Work Experience, and rename the section to “Featured AI Work” or “AI Engineering Portfolio.” Then rename the old Projects section to “Corporate Projects” and move it below.

Option B (safer for bank recruiters): Merge the two, but reorder: AI projects first in the list, corporate second. The current corporate-first ordering reinforces the “bank engineer + side hobby” perception.

I’d recommend Option A — it’s a 10-second structural change that completely re-frames what kind of engineer you are.

5. Skills section: add an AI/ML cluster at the top

Current: “5 or more years: Chinese, English, Writing, Java, Algorithm…”

Add an explicit AI/ML line at the very top of the skills section:

AI and Machine Learning:

This takes the skills section from “generic senior engineer” to “AI engineer” in one visible cluster.

6. Expected Positions: reorder

Current:

AI Engineer / Full Stack Engineer / Backend Engineer / Machine Learning Engineer / Member of Technical Staff / Staff Engineer

Change to:

AI Engineer / Machine Learning Engineer / Staff Engineer / Full Stack Engineer / Backend Engineer

Leading with the AI titles primes the recruiter’s categorization. The non-AI titles are still there for fallback, but they’re lower priority.

Right after the header, before Profile:

AI engineer building production systems and training models from scratch. 11 years of engineering across mobile, backend, and cloud — now focused on making AI reliable and practical in enterprise environments.

Replaces the “I also do AI” framing with “I am an AI engineer who also ships enterprise software.”

Summary of changes (all structural, zero content lost)

What Change
Header title “Resume” → “Zhiwei Li — AI Engineer”
Profile AI cluster first, engineering second, personal third
TEKsystems bullets AI bullet #1, banking context #2
AI Projects section Move to #2 position (after Work Experience)
Skills section Add AI/ML cluster at top
Expected Positions AI titles first
Summary banner Optional 1-liner above profile

None of these require writing new content. It’s a reprioritization exercise — you have all the material, it’s just arranged in the wrong order for the market you want to compete in.

Want me to draft the actual Profile section rewrite so you can copy-paste it?

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