Taehyun Lee

My name is Jinwoo Kang (Alden), and I lead the Infrastructure Division at Karrot. I hired Taehyun Lee (Walter) as an intern at Karrot in January 2023, and we worked together for nearly three years and five months until he left in May 2026 to pursue graduate studies in the United States. I chose Taehyun for the winter internship because of his potential for growth and positive attitude, and he exceeded my expectations on both counts.

For three years, Taehyun was responsible for internal platforms used every day by multiple product teams, including video and image platforms and tools for monitoring service health. The video platform in particular had to be built from the ground up. His flexible design avoided dependence on a particular SaaS provider, and his reliable operation of the platform enabled the successful launch of Karrot Story.

In just three years, these qualities helped Taehyun grow from an L3 to an L4 engineer. Had he not wanted to pursue his dream of graduate school, I would have continued to support him in staying at Karrot and building better platforms. He was such a strong engineer that I did not want him to leave. I was sorry to see him go, but supported his decision to pursue his dream.

I am confident that Taehyun will continue to learn quickly and soon become an engineer of a very high caliber.

I worked with Taehyun Lee for approximately three years as his team lead on a team building common platforms at Karrot.

Taehyun brings a valuable combination of analytical thinking, ownership, and execution. He examines metrics and data closely to identify opportunities for improvement and carefully distinguishes symptoms from underlying causes. He takes responsibility for driving work forward and seeing it through to completion. I was particularly impressed by how quickly he learned the video and CDN domains and applied that knowledge to deliver remarkable results. He starts by understanding the problem, then chooses the technology needed to solve it.

As a teammate, Taehyun puts the team’s goals and collective success ahead of individual achievements. He continually looks for ways to improve how the team works together. He is receptive to feedback and equally willing to offer honest, constructive feedback to his leader.

Working with Taehyun helped me grow in both how I approach problems and how I lead and collaborate with a team. I would welcome the opportunity to work with him again. If you have the chance to work with Taehyun, consider yourself fortunate—you will be gaining a colleague who helps those around him achieve meaningful results and grow together.

Mijeong Rachel Park Platform Team Lead, Karrot

I worked alongside Walter on the same team for two years and saw his growth as an engineer up close.

Walter is a versatile engineer who combines technical expertise with strong communication and collaboration skills.

What stands out most is how he taught himself low-level concepts such as codecs and compression technologies to gain a thorough understanding of the media domain, which was new to him, and then organized what he had learned and shared it with his colleagues. His efforts were especially valuable because our team did not have an expert in image or video technology at the time.

He could explain complex technology in writing in a way that was easy for others to understand, and he was excellent at communicating his ideas clearly. As a result, the knowledge Walter gained benefited the entire team rather than remaining his alone.

Another strength I value highly in Walter is his ability to have a naturally positive influence on the people around him, even without a formal title or authority.

He never shied away from the less glamorous work the team needed done. He readily helped colleagues who were struggling, and when a new teammate joined, he took the initiative to approach them and thoughtfully help them settle into an unfamiliar environment. I believe these actions played a major role in building trust within the team and creating an atmosphere where people enjoyed working together.

He is someone I would gladly work with again whenever the opportunity arises.

I worked with Taehyun Lee at Karrot for about three and a half years. We were both part of the Infrastructure Division, where our collaboration centered on the reliable operation of large-scale image and video platforms. Taehyun led this work on the Common Services Team, and I supported it as a member of the SRE team.

What stands out most from working with Taehyun is that he kept Karrot’s image and video platforms running reliably around the clock for a service with more than 20 million monthly active users. He quickly learned new technologies along the way and always worked carefully and thoroughly to ensure changes could be rolled out without problems. I felt he was a colleague I could trust to work with in any domain and at any scale.

I also remember how he always worked to clearly define and fully understand the goals he was given, and proactively led discussions about improvements.

Beyond his strong technical skills and sense of responsibility, I believe Taehyun’s greatest strength is his willingness to understand his colleagues and listen to them attentively. He always listened to others with a cheerful demeanor and worked with them to find better approaches. I believe this is why even large, complex projects could be launched quickly and improved continuously.

I respected him as a colleague and felt there was a great deal I could learn from him, both technically and personally.

Taehyun and I were on different teams, but we worked together several times.

What surprised me most was how much interest Taehyun took in what colleagues were working on. This awareness of the wider context, and the initiative that comes with it, is Taehyun’s biggest strength.

For example, I once worked on a change that would affect Taehyun’s work. Taehyun could have just waited and used the result. Instead, Taehyun took the time to understand the problem with me, tried the workflow first-hand as a user, and then contributed code.

We also worked together on our GCP global CDN migration from AWS. We shared ownership of this work, and Taehyun put a lot of effort into it. Taehyun’s GCP and AWS knowledge and clear communication were a real help throughout.

We also studied Python together, and Taehyun’s skills were strong enough to lead the team.

I would gladly work with Taehyun again, and I recommend Taehyun.