Yichen (Ethan) Lin

Introducing the M5 The M5 chip brings significant advancements in performance and efficiency across various applications. 1. Massive GPU / AI performance boost The M5 features a next-generation 10-core GPU architecture, with each core equipped with an integrated Neural Accelerator. This results in over 4× the peak GPU compute performance for AI tasks compared to the M4. 2. Stronger CPU and enhanced Neural Engine With up to a 10-core CPU (6 efficiency cores + 4 performance cores), the M5 offers approximately 15% faster multithreaded performance over the M4. Additionally, the Neural Engine has been upgraded to 16 cores, enhancing performance for on-device AI and intelligent features. 3. Higher memory bandwidth / unified memory improvements The M5 provides around 153 GB/s of unified memory bandwidth, which is approximately 30% more than the M4. This unified memory architecture allows all components (CPU, GPU, Neural Engine) to access a larger memory pool, enabling larger AI models to run entirely on-device. 4. Graphics & rendering enhancements The improvements in the GPU also boost graphics performance, including ray tracing capabilities. Apple claims up to a ~45% uplift compared to the M4 in ray-traced workloads, enhancing visual fidelity, rendering speed, and smoothness in demanding 3D and graphics applications. 5. Deployment in new hardware + energy efficiency / environmental goals The M5 will power new devices, including the 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and upgraded Vision Pro, all of which are available for pre-order.

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If you're a Senior Engineer looking to move up, the next role will likely be a Staff Engineer. And in this guide, Shruti shares tips from her own experience of getting promoted to Staff Engineer at PayPal and Slack. She talks about what Staff Engineers do (and how it's different from Seniors), why you might not be getting promoted, and how to take that next step. https://lnkd.in/g58dnFEG

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New from O’Reilly + Redis: Managing Memory for AI Agents 📘 AI agents are only as good as their memory. This new report explores how short-term, long-term, and persistent memory shape agent performance—and how Redis provides real-time, scalable architectures for production-ready AI. 📖 Read the full report: https://lnkd.in/g7t--57p

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When Steve Huynh was a principal engineer at Amazon, meetings began with a "study hall." Amazon had a "reading culture" even among engineers, Huynh recently told the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, speaking of his time at the tech giant. Employees frequently drafted six-page memos, which they shared with the company to update progress and demonstrate new projects. Huynh, who said the company's embrace of writing and reading the memos was part of its "secret sauce," said employees' writing was often constrained to the format, whether it was a business strategy or press release. Huynh started at Amazon in 2006, only a few years after the company turned its first profit and while Jeff Bezos was at the helm. Read more about how Bezos instilled this culture of memo-writing from the top down on Business Insider: https://lnkd.in/gBqbEf_j (Credit: Daniel Berman) #amazon #reading #jeffbezos

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If you interview at Google for mid-to-senior roles, nearly every other round tests your system design skills. At Amazon? More than half of your interviews is about system design. At Microsoft? You can expect up to 60% of your rounds to go deep on architecture and design. At Meta? 70%+ of questions will challenge how you build and scale real systems. At Uber? Same story, system design is the backbone of the process. The more senior the role, the more system design dominates the interview, and with AI accelerating everything, even SDE-1s will soon need to master these fundamentals. Here are the most asked questions, so you can start preparing today, which will train you on the fundamentals that are continuously tested.  1. Social Networks & Messaging ↬ Design Twitter Feed ↬ Design Instagram Feed ↬ Design WhatsApp Messaging ↬ Design Facebook Messenger ↬ Design Twitter Direct Messages ↬ Design Instagram Stories ↬ Design Instagram Ads ↬ Design Twitter Notifications ↬ Design Tinder ↬ Design Reddit ↬ Design Facebook News Feed ↬ Design LinkedIn Connections ↬ Design Notification Service ↬ Design Facebook Messenger Payments  2. Media Streaming & Recommendations ↬ Design Spotify Playlist ↬ Design Netflix Playlist ↬ Design Netflix Recommendations ↬ Design YouTube Streaming ↬ Design Spotify Connect ↬ Design Spotify Discover Weekly ↬ Design Instagram Reels ↬ Design TikTok Feed ↬ Design YouTube ↬ Design Amazon Recommendations  3. E-commerce & Marketplaces ↬ Design Amazon Shopping Cart ↬ Design Amazon E-commerce Store ↬ Design Shopify Store ↬ Design Flight Booking System ↬ Design Stock Exchange System ↬ Design Payment System ↬ Design Uber Eats ↬ Design Uber Dispatch System ↬ Design Food Delivery App ↬ Design Uber Pool ↬ Design Uber Freight ↬ Design Booking System (BookMyShow)  4. File Storage, Collaboration & Productivity ↬ Design Google Drive ↬ Design Google Docs ↬ Design Dropbox File Sharing ↬ Design Distributed Cloud Storage (S3) ↬ Design Online Code Editor ↬ Design Code Deployment System ↬ Design File Sharing System ↬ Design Distributed Web Crawler  5. Infrastructure & Distributed Systems ↬ Design Distributed Message Queue (Kafka) ↬ Design Amazon SQS ↬ Design Distributed Locking Service ↬ Design Amazon EC2 ↬ Design Amazon DynamoDB ↬ Design Amazon Redshift ↬ Design AWS S3 ↬ Design Google Analytics ↬ Design Analytics Platform (Metrics & Logging) Check comments for more questions ↓ – P.S: You can find all of these problems on Layrs (layrs.me), It’s Leetcode but for learning System Design, we’re constantly adding more to our list. I quit my job at Google to build this platform and change the way we learn system design for every engineer out there. Also join our Discord Server, we’re quite active and would love to hear from you: https://lnkd.in/g9wGRadq

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The best advice I got on my promotions as a software engineer was from a Principal Architect at Amazon after he told me his story of getting promoted to Principal, and this has stayed with me my whole career. He said, very simply: > Your architecture can be a love letter to your technical brilliance, > but if it does not move customer and company goals, it will not move your level. That hurt a little. Because I recognised myself in it. A few years ago I wanted to design something with every shiny thing in the book: API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, event bus, the works. On paper it was beautiful. In reality it was expensive, slow to ship, and did not match the skills of the team that would maintain it. So we shipped a hybrid architecture instead. Fewer moving parts, more reuse of existing services, cheaper to run, easier to hand over. Over time, here is how my thinking about promotions changed. 1. Start from the business goal, not the tech stack Before talking about Kafka vs SQS or MySQL vs DynamoDB, answer this first: What money, risk, or customer pain will this remove? Promotions track that, not the number of services in your diagram. 2. Ship finished products, not clever demos Leaders remember the feature that went live, stayed stable, and earned or saved real money. Drive the entire lifecycle yourself: design, build, launch, oncall, cleanup, docs. 3. Make the team faster, not just yourself Tools, scripts, templates, better CI, better dashboards. If people quietly say “things move faster when you are on this” your manager already has half a promotion case. 4. Do your share of the unsexy work Oncall, migrations, bugs, incident reviews. Senior folks who avoid this slow the entire org. Senior folks who lean into it become trusted very quickly. 5. Grow people, not just systems Mentor juniors, run design reviews, write clear docs, set standards. When your manager sees that you are already acting like the next level, formal promotion becomes a catch up, not a favour. 6. Be proactive about your promotion, not obsessed with it Have periodic one to ones. Talk about where you want to go and ask what evidence your manager would need to support that. Remember your manager has ten other people to manage. It is your responsibility to make your impact visible. Do not be desperate. Understand the timelines and work within them. As you get close to the boundary, collect the missing data points: impact metrics, incident write ups, design docs, peer feedback. Make the story easy to tell. Most importantly, work for the business, not for promotion-driven development. If your roadmap only exists to tick boxes on a promotion rubric, people can feel it. If your roadmap clearly creates value, saves cost, or reduces risk, promotion becomes the natural side effect. So instead of asking “What new tech can I use this year?” Ask, “Where can I create obvious business impact and leave the system and the people around me better than I found them?”

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Why does an E3 level SWE at Meta make only ~190k/year, while an E8 level engineer makes over ~$2M/year, even though both engineers are ICs and spend the same time at work? I have spent the last 5 years at Meta as an IC. I joined with a little over 15 years of experience, and I’ve worked with many solid engineers in this time. Here is how I think about that compensation jump. 1. Same hours, completely different “unit of work” An E3’s unit of work is usually a task or a ticket. An E8’s unit of work is a multi year problem for the company. E3: “Implement this service, fix this bug, write this feature.” E8: “How do we cut infra cost by 20 percent across this product” or “How do we make this platform safe to scale to 10x users.” One person is paid to execute. The other is paid to decide what is worth executing in the first place. 2. Radius of impact E3 usually impacts a file, a service, maybe a small team. E8 shapes whole orgs and product lines. If an E3 ships something great, the impact is great but local. If an E8 ships the right platform, hundreds of engineers become faster and the company saves or earns millions every year. Comp tracks the area of the circle you influence. 3. Risk and downside protection At junior levels, mistakes are usually contained and reversible. At senior staff levels, a bad call can burn tens of millions or damage the brand. E8s are paid for judgment under ambiguity. They decide which bets the company should not make, which migrations can wait, which “shiny idea” is going to kill reliability. You pay more to people whose good judgment protects you from very expensive failures.  4. They scale themselves This can happen in a few ways. 1. Delegation with ownership They define the shape of the problem, then hand large pieces to other senior and mid level engineers while keeping the bar and direction clear. 2. Knowledge that travels They write RFCs, public comments, FAQs, wikis, internal posts. One answer helps hundreds of people who will face the same issue next quarter. 3. Tools over heroics Instead of unblocking people manually all day, they build tools, libraries or guardrails so others can unblock themselves. One well designed tool can save thousands of engineering hours every year. This is what “scaling yourself” actually looks like. The company pays for that multiplier.  5. Ownership of the “uncomfortable problems” Junior engineers usually work inside a well defined box. E8s take ownership between the boxes. They pick up problems that:  Span many teams and no one really “owns”  Require aligning leaders who disagree  Have product, infra, legal and security angles at the same time Most people avoid those because they are messy, political and slow. Very senior ICs lean into them. That is where a lot of value sits. Continued ↓

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🦺 🛟 Agent Safety > Model Safety LLMs didn't break your app. Agents can. As we wire LLMs to tools, browsers, payments & code the risk shifts from bad text to bad actions. Top failure modes (seen in the wild & in papers): 🚩 Prompt/Content Injection -> Tool Misuse. Malicious web pages or data instruct agents to steal secrets or make unintended API calls. This is now a primary risk for browsing and MCP - style tool agents. 🚩 Over permissioned tools & long-lived tokens. Agents get "god mode" scopes. A single injection becomes account takeover or irreversible ops. Security notes for MCP emphasise least privilege and short-lived auth. 🚩 Unsafe web autonomy. Benchmarks show web agents will attempt harmful tasks unless constrained (posting misinformation, illicit sales, etc.). You must measure misuse not just assume guardrails. 🚩 Supply-chain & retrieval poisoning. Agents trust plugins, third-party tools & indexed data that an attacker can taint. OWASP’s newest GenAI Top 10 calls this out explicitly. 🚩 Process safety gaps. NIST's GenAI Profile (AI 600-1) warns that organizations ship agents without role clarity, human-in-the-loop or incident playbooks. ✅ Model safety reduces bad text. Agent safety prevents bad state. Treat the agent like a junior SRE - with narrow permissions, audited actions and clear escalation paths. If you're building agents, what's the one control you won't ship without? Also drop a comment if you'd like me to share a follow-up post on how to tackle each of these risks. #AgenticAI #AISafety #AIAgents #GenAI #CyberSecurity #MCP #OWASP #NIST #AITrust #ResponsibleAI #AIForBusiness

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Google Research Director Denny Zhou, who founded the LLM Reasoning Team at DeepMind, recently gave a great talk at Stanford’s CS25 class: Large Language Model Reasoning. This was one of the most intuitive talks about reasoning model training and application. He outlined new directions for training models to handle questions where answers aren’t easily verifiable. My team is currently working on an enterprise LLM project focused on using reasoning to extract relevant context and generate responses for unverifiable cases. It’s a tough but promising area, and it’s an interesting time to be building. [Link to Denny Zhou's talk: https://lnkd.in/gdJ6Mzi8]

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Many enterprise GPUs run a single model during inference — even when it uses only ~30% of memory. So how much capacity is being left on the table? In our latest benchmark with Nebius, we used NVIDIA Run:ai fractional GPU allocation and NVIDIA NIM to measure real-world impact on throughput, latency, and concurrency. What we found: ✅ 86% of full GPU concurrent user capacity using just 0.5 slice ✅ 3× more users with mixed workloads on shared GPUs ✅ Near-linear scaling down to 0.125 slices ✅ Zero latency cliffs during autoscaling Stop GPU fragmentation. Start maximizing throughput. 🔗 Read the full deep dive: https://bit.ly/4kGtErX

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Joakim Recht (Uber Distinguished Eng) on tech leads: "Software engineers need to write code. If you're not writing code, you're not a software engineer." Joakim Recht grew from a Senior Engineer to a Distinguished Engineer at Uber and I asked him what it took to get there. We covered: • The project that grew his career • What makes a great software engineer • Learnings from promo committees • When promos are unfair • Biggest technical mistake at Uber in hindsight • Advice for his younger self 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gTvsB3Ar • Transcript: https://lnkd.in/gG7bmeU2 • Spotify: https://lnkd.in/g4n-fUxe • Apple: https://lnkd.in/gm8r-2_R

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