Shiyun Liu's Place

Hi, I’m Shiyun — a product-minded software engineer based in New York City.

I like being the person who takes something from nothing to shipped. Most of my work has been zero-to-one: sitting close to the problem, figuring out what the product actually needs to do, and then building it end to end. These days that means full-stack work in React, TypeScript, and Go on AI-assisted workflows in fintech — turning messy, ambiguous inputs into something structured that a person can trust and correct.

Before that I spent six years at Looking Glass Factory building holographic products and the developer platform around them. I led the productization of Liteforms, a conversational AI hologram product, and owned the developer experience of the Unity plugin — the sample scenes, setup flows, and documentation that decide whether someone’s first hour with your SDK ends in a working build or a closed tab. I also worked on the ArcGIS integration’s rendering layer and on display calibration R&D, which led to a co-invented patent.

The thread through all of it is building tools that take repetitive, tedious work off someone’s plate so they can spend their attention on the part that actually matters.

I got here sideways: I studied game programming as an undergrad and earned my master’s in game design at NYU, and I still build games — casual, simulation, RPG, and strategy — in Unity and more recently Godot. Games taught me most of what I know about real-time systems, and about the fact that people judge software by how it feels, not by how it’s architected. The Projects page has both halves.

Outside of tech I’m a dedicated art lover. I practice quick sketching, figure drawing, and traditional Chinese painting — creative outlets that fuel my imagination both in code and on canvas.