I joined Lablup in April 2021. It’s now been eight months, and I’d like to briefly share my experience so far.

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Application Process

Before joining Lablup, I worked at a finance-related company in Yeouido. It was a great experience where I met some wonderful people. One of them later moved to Lablup and shared positive things about the company, which sparked my interest. I decided to give it a try and submitted my resume. Shortly after, I was contacted and completed a programming test followed by an interview.

If you’re interested in our job openings, feel free to visit Lablup’s regularly updated homepage.

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Background

While I was on a scholarship in France, I had the opportunity to study abroad for a semester. At the time, I didn’t know much about Korea or its culture, but I had always been fascinated by Asia due to my early interest in Japanese video games and animation.

In 2016, my university established a partnership with Seoul National University of Science and Technology. On the day of the announcement, my professor asked who would be interested in spending six months in Korea. Without much thought, my hand went up—almost involuntarily.

It was my first time living in a country so culturally different from my own. I met amazing people, built strong friendships, and learned a lot—about both human relationships and technology. The experience was incredibly enriching. But as with most good things, it eventually came to an end.

As graduation approached, I began to think seriously about my next steps. Many of my classmates were applying to companies in France, and some had already received offers. But I didn’t feel that path was right for me. I wanted something different—something that would allow me to return to Korea and continue exploring new challenges.

So, I started researching visa procedures, housing options, and job opportunities. After graduation, I booked a flight to Seoul and began my job search.

One of my master's majors was cybersecurity, and I hoped to gain experience in that area. Soon after, I found a finance company that needed help with both web development and security. During my time there, I worked with brilliant people who generously shared their knowledge—one of whom eventually joined Lablup.

He told me about Lablup’s open-source and AI research projects, its wide-ranging technologies in cloud computing, and the company’s rapid growth. This piqued my interest, and around the same time, Lablup began hiring more engineers and developers. I submitted my application, passed the resume screening and programming test, and proceeded to the interview.

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About Lablup

If you're passionate about cloud computing, software, or AI, Lablup is one of the most exciting tech startups in Korea. Everyone here is both passionate and highly skilled.

Lablup develops and manages Backend.AI, a resource orchestration platform for AI research. More specifically, Backend.AI is a container-based computing cluster orchestrator that hosts various programming languages and machine learning frameworks. It allocates and isolates computing resources across multiple sessions.

During my first week, my task was to install and run Backend.AI on my local machine and create a use case using similar tools. One of these involved building a chat application using aiohttp, an asynchronous HTTP client/server. The whole process went smoothly. Everyone was open to questions and eager to help, which made the experience enjoyable and left a strong first impression.

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Experience

In my first week, I focused on simple tasks and resolved beginner-level issues in Backend.AI to better understand the platform’s architecture and the development workflow.
Backend.AI has a complex structure, so it took some time to fully grasp. During this time, I worked on resolving "good first issues."

Once I understood how the system’s components interact, I shared my insights into the domain, group, user, and policy management systems through a presentation that explored function calls, data storage, and logic.

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License Management

Although the Backend.AI platform is open source, companies or individuals must purchase a license to receive engineering support or to access the full range of features.

At first glance, the concept of licensing may seem simple—users buy a license to access the software. But the actual system is more involved. It includes generating encrypted keys for each user, creating customized license keys, and having the system validate these keys via request handling, expiration updates, and more.
There’s quite a bit of work for both humans and machines.

To streamline this, I’ve mainly been working on integrating the license server into the back office to provide a clearer view of and easier access to license management.

Through this project, I not only became familiar with Golang (a programming language developed by Google), but also deepened my understanding of AWS cloud instances and security group configuration.
My time was divided between studying and implementation. I frequently referred to both internal and external resources during work hours and benefitted greatly from feedback during code reviews or casual chats with colleagues over coffee.

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In Closing

As an orchestrator, Backend.AI is composed of many components—Manager, Agent, Storage Proxy, and more.
Working at Lablup means dealing with a variety of tools, programming languages, and systems, and developing a deep understanding of how they all fit together.

I often wonder what I’ll be doing in five years. It’s a tough question, and I know not all hopes come to fruition. But I sincerely hope Backend.AI becomes even more widely adopted, and I plan to continue contributing to it—alongside other exciting projects.

I’ll continue working hard with a genuine passion for programming, striving to become a vital part of the company and a supportive colleague to my teammates.

If you’re passionate about programming, AI, cloud computing, or IT in general—and want to work with other passionate, talented people—consider joining Lablup.

Thank you for reading.