CS + HCI/AI @ Virginia Tech · SDE Intern @ AWS
Elizabeth Ho
Hi, I'm Elizabeth! I'm a Computer Science student with minors in Human-Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence at Virginia Tech, and a returning SDE intern at AWS. I'm interested in building technology that enhances everyday lives, especially through thoughtful and intuitive design.
I'm especially drawn to the design side of tech: understanding how people actually use a product, and what makes something feel easy or frustrating. That's what led me to full-stack development, where I get to both design and build, turning ideas into something real and usable.
.png)
<Experience/>
Industry
Software Development Engineer Intern @ Amazon Web Services
May 2026 – Aug 2026- Rearchitected a legacy batch reporting pipeline into a real-time event-driven service, reducing pipeline stages by 63% with Python, TypeScript, and AWS-managed services while eliminating cross-team dependencies and enabling end-to-end team ownership.
- Restored accurate weekly business-metrics reporting by tracing a misconfigured database reference in the collection path, then adding integration tests and CloudWatch alarms for automated failure detection.
- Reduced ad-hoc leadership queries by 76% by building reusable Athena SQL analyses and the team's first QuickSight dashboards for daily and weekly customer-usage and growth reporting.
- Achieved 100% leadership reporting coverage by closing a 7-region gap and automating portable multi-region deployment and historical backfill with AWS CDK.
Software Development Engineer Intern @ Amazon Web Services
May 2025 – Aug 2025- Reduced certificate synchronization and backfill time by 99% and saved 1 developer-month per new region by replacing a manual script with an automated pipeline designed and built in Python and TypeScript to synchronize records across two teams' services.
- Scaled daily synchronization and regional backfills by designing a state-machine workflow that partitioned SQL extraction tasks across parallel AWS Lambda executions, with feature flags for controlled rollout and rollback.
- Automated detection of missing certificate records and pipeline failures by writing SQL validation queries to identify discrepancies between services and implementing the system's first CloudWatch alarms, replacing manual dashboard checks.
- Presented org-wide to 100+ engineers and senior leaders. The pipeline, which the team nicknamed “Lizzy Lambda,” still runs in production a year later from the team's official runbook.
Freelance Web Developer @ My Color Nails & Spa
2024 – Present- Design and build custom websites for individuals and small businesses, from initial concept and UX design through development and deployment.
- Built a full production site for My Color Nails & Spa (Manassas, VA) featuring services, hours, location, and customer testimonials.
University & Leadership
LLM Undergraduate Research Assistant @ Virginia Tech
Jan 2026 – Present- Developing the LLM reasoning layer for a privacy-preserving classroom analytics system under Dr. Nizamani, turning 60-second pose and gaze segments from 15 students into per-student engagement scores and lecture-level trends.
- Evaluated hierarchical zero-shot LLM predictions across 219 paired observations from 15 students and 8 human annotators, quantifying agreement across engagement, posture, and gaze to study the effects of temporal context and segmentation.
- Separately, conducting user research with K-12 educators and students (ages 10–18) to design age-appropriate AI teaching resources for the CodeKids platform, translating Virginia CS SOL standards into interactive learning activities (Prof. Hamouda).
Teaching Assistant, Software Design & Data Structures / Data Structures & Algorithms @ Virginia Tech
Jan 2026 – Present- Support 200+ students in implementing Java course projects through weekly labs and office hours, teaching object-oriented programming, debugging, data structure selection, and algorithm complexity analysis while guiding implementation tradeoffs and performance reasoning.
- Built reusable Java test automation covering requirements, edge cases, and regressions, accelerating grading across 50+ submissions per cycle so other TAs can validate more scenarios with less manual review.
- Lead weekly workshops teaching students to apply newly released AI coding features to codebase navigation, dependency tracing, and debugging.
Web Development Lead (Elected Officer) @ Society of Asian Scientists & Engineers
Aug 2024 – Present- Own the chapter's React + Vite website end to end, with a CI/CD pipeline auto-deploying to production and PR reviews for member contributions.
- Lead the SASE Web Dev Committee: onboard student contributors to the GitHub org and mentor them through git, npm, and React workflows.
- Produce the chapter's annual data analytics report (membership demographics, event attendance, sponsorship totals) used to build the corporate Sponsorship Packet.
- Migrated the site's styling from vanilla CSS to Tailwind and built the Sponsors and About pages as a web developer before being elected.
<Projects/>

Make-a-Moji 🎨AWS Kids Day
2026A GenAI kiosk that teaches kids AI prompting. They describe an emoji, watch it generate, and take home a printed sticker. It served 300+ kids in a single day, printing 365+ stickers.


CR Sensei 🥋AWS HackyChan
2026A CLI that coaches first-time contributors through their first code review, backed by a versioned rulebook written by the engineers who came before them.
Also built
Raptor Transit 🚉Personal project
In progressA calendar-aware transit planner that tells you when to leave for a scheduled event, ranking journeys by predicted on-time arrival rather than scheduled travel time.
Go · GTFS · GTFS-Realtime · Google Cloud Platform · PyTorch
Package Explorer 🕸️Personal project
2026An AI-assisted change-impact tool that maps package and file dependencies to show which components and tests a proposed change breaks, exposed to coding agents as MCP tools.
Python · FastAPI · React · Tree-sitter · Neo4j · Claude API · MCP
SmartSort 🗂️Personal project
2026A native macOS menu-bar utility that watches your Desktop and auto-sorts screenshots by reading them with on-device OCR.
Swift · SwiftUI · Vision Framework · DispatchSource
githubWeather-I-Go 🌦️NASA Space Apps
2025Tells you whether the weather suits your event, anywhere on Earth, with Gemini-generated insights.
React Native · TypeScript · Node.js · Firebase · Gemini
devpostAvec Ma 🤍HackViolet
2026A calming maternity companion with AI chat, mood tracking, and finance tools.
Next.js · TypeScript · Tailwind CSS · Gemini · Recharts
devpostSmart Scheduler 🗺️AWS Kiro Hackathon
2025Maps your Virginia Tech class schedule and checks whether it's actually walkable in time.
Next.js · TypeScript · Express · Flask · DynamoDB · Leaflet
devpostSummaNotes 📝VTHacks 13
2024Highlight any text and get an instant AI summary with Amazon Polly audio playback.
React · JavaScript · OpenAI API · Amazon Polly · Python
devpost<Education/>
Virginia Tech
2024 – May 2028B.S. Computer Science, minors in Human-Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence
- GPA 3.70 / 4.00
- Relevant coursework: Computer Systems, Data Structures & Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Organization I & II, Intermediate Software Design & Engineering, Cloud Development
- Activities: Google Developer Student, Data Structures & Algorithms, HackViolet, VTHacks, Society of Asian Scientists & Engineers (Web Development Lead, elected officer), Code Kids
- Certifications & training: AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, Anthropic Claude 101
<Connect/>
Thanks so much for taking the time to look around and get to know me a little! Check out my blog to keep up with what I'm learning and thinking about, and please reach out anytime. I'd love to hear from you!





.png)