Zhen Li 李珎
Engineering Lead (Senior Staff AI Engineer) @ Replit
Creator & Lead Engineer of Replit Agent
🚀 Ships & News
| When | What | Links |
|---|---|---|
| Apr 28 2026 | Replit Slides officially launched — I led development | [X] [docs] |
| Mar 11 2026 | Replit Agent 4 launched — I led major development across Design Canvas, parallel agents, and the multi-artifact project experience | [Agent 4] [docs] |
| Feb 2026 | Replit Animation launched — I led development | [blog] [docs] |
| Dec 2025 | Replit launches inside ChatGPT | [blog] |
| Dec 2025 | Replit ranked #1 fastest-growing vendor in B2B | [Amjad] |
| Oct 2025 | a16z AI Spending Report — Replit ranked #3 | [a16z] |
| Sep 2025 | Replit Agent 3 — 10x more autonomous, I lead the project | [blog] |
| Jul 2025 | Web Search for Agent — I authored the announcement | [blog] |
| Jun 2025 | Replit hits $100M ARR (10x in 6 months) | [article] |
| Feb 2025 | Replit Agent v2 — Major reliability & UX upgrade, I lead the project | [blog] |
| Sep 2024 | Replit Agent launched — I initiated, prototyped, and lead the project | [blog] [Karpathy] |
🎙️ Talks & Writing
| When | What | Links |
|---|---|---|
| Apr 5 2026 | Elon reposted my Replit pitch — 20M+ views | [Elon] |
| Mar 2026 | 📝 The good way to AgentMaxxing | [Substack] |
| Mar 2026 | 🎬 Featured in Replit's Agent 3 documentary — The Untold Chaos Behind a $3 Billion AI Startup Launch | [YouTube] |
| Jan 2026 | 📝 Decision-Time Guidance: Keeping Replit Agent Reliable — I authored this | [blog] |
| Apr 2026 | 🏆 Judged Microsoft Imagine Cup 2026 Semifinals | [Imagine Cup] |
| Nov 2025 | 📝 Ship Fast Is the Moat — Lessons from Replit Agent | [Substack] |
| Apr 2025 | 🎙️ 洒洒水 — How non-tech people use AI to work for themselves | [小宇宙] [Apple] |
| Dec 2024 | 🎙️ OnBoard! — Deep dive into Coding Agents & OpenAI o3 | [小宇宙] [Apple] |
| Dec 2024 | 🎤 Replit Tech Talk — Agent Architecture Deep Dive | [YouTube] |
| Nov 2024 | 🎤 Replit Summit Japan | [LinkedIn] |
| Oct 2024 | 🎤 Linkloud Salon @ SaaStr — AI reshaping SaaS globally | [QQ News] |
| Sep 2024 | 📰 硅兔赛跑 — Exclusive interview on Replit Agent | [36氪] [163] |
| May 2024 | 🎙️ OnBoard! — Will AI Agents replace programmers? | [小宇宙] [Apple] |
| May 2023 | 📝 8 projects in 11 months — just ship more | [Substack] |
🔦 Highlights
🎓 Education
-
B.E. in Software Engineering at Beihang University (北京航空航天大学)
- Ranked #1 in class of 136
- National Scholarship recipient
- Graduated with honors
- President of Microsoft Student Technology Club
👨💻 Experience
-
Engineering Lead (Senior Staff AI Engineer) at Replit
- Creator & Lead Engineer of Replit Agent
- Grew Agent to $250M+ ARR (10x in 6 months)
-
Machine Learning Engineer at ByteDance
- Built ML systems for TikTok recommendation and ads
-
Senior Software Engineer at Google
- User Modeling & Stateful Search
- ML for Google Search, Discover, and News
-
Research Intern at Microsoft Research Asia
- Distributed graph computation (Tux²)
🧐 Expertise
- AI Agents, LLMs, Recommendation Systems, ML at Scale