I am Wonkyum Lee, a seasoned ML Architect with 15+ years of experience in Speech AI, NLP, and Large Language Models. I have scaled the ML division at Gridspace as Head of ML for 9 years and recently co-founded Enlighten Care to architect next-generation Voice AI agents for healthcare. I thrive at bridging cutting-edge research with scalable, production-grade AI solutions that drive meaningful revenue. I excel at leading cross-functional teams, designing robust training infrastructures, and delivering end-to-end ML pipelines—from data collection and annotation to modeling, evaluation, and production operations. I am passionate about practical AI that delivers measurable impact for customers and patients.

Wonkyum Lee

I am Wonkyum Lee, a seasoned ML Architect with 15+ years of experience in Speech AI, NLP, and Large Language Models. I have scaled the ML division at Gridspace as Head of ML for 9 years and recently co-founded Enlighten Care to architect next-generation Voice AI agents for healthcare. I thrive at bridging cutting-edge research with scalable, production-grade AI solutions that drive meaningful revenue. I excel at leading cross-functional teams, designing robust training infrastructures, and delivering end-to-end ML pipelines—from data collection and annotation to modeling, evaluation, and production operations. I am passionate about practical AI that delivers measurable impact for customers and patients.

Available to hire

I am Wonkyum Lee, a seasoned ML Architect with 15+ years of experience in Speech AI, NLP, and Large Language Models. I have scaled the ML division at Gridspace as Head of ML for 9 years and recently co-founded Enlighten Care to architect next-generation Voice AI agents for healthcare. I thrive at bridging cutting-edge research with scalable, production-grade AI solutions that drive meaningful revenue.

I excel at leading cross-functional teams, designing robust training infrastructures, and delivering end-to-end ML pipelines—from data collection and annotation to modeling, evaluation, and production operations. I am passionate about practical AI that delivers measurable impact for customers and patients.

See more

Experience Level

Expert
Expert
Expert
Expert
Expert
Expert
Intermediate
Intermediate
Intermediate
Intermediate
See more

Language

English
Fluent

Work Experience

Co-Founder, CTO at Enlighten Care
January 1, 2025 - December 31, 2025
Sole Technical Owner: Architected and engineered a comprehensive MVP stack from scratch, including AI agents, backend services, frontend UI/UX (React), and HIPAA-compliant security infrastructure. Product Validation: Developed a Voice AI agent for hospital systems to handle after-hours triaging and specialist referrals; successfully conducted client demos and pilot studies to validate core features. Zero-to-One Delivery: Scoped and executed all engineering work independently, translating complex customer business logic into functional automated workflows for care manager support.
Head of Machine Learning at Gridspace
March 1, 2016 - December 31, 2024
Strategic Leadership: Progressed from ASR Specialist to Head of ML, managing a team of 13 researchers and engineers. Directed the development of core ASR, TTS, Emotion recognition models, and in-house Fine-Tuned LLMs. Infrastructure Ownership: Architected and built a scalable training infrastructure leveraging a Hybrid TPU and GPU environment. Revenue Impact: Directly contributed to achieving $10M+ ARR by boosting ASR accuracy from 81% to 94% in the contact center domain; delivered systems handling 30k concurrent audio streams and processing over 1B minutes of speech. Scale & Performance: Delivered 100x improvement in customer service data analysis capabilities for USAA. Full lifecycle: Owned the entire ML pipeline from data collection to production operations.
Software Engineer Intern at CAPIO
May 1, 2015 - September 30, 2015
Developed a large-scale distributed training pipeline for speech recognition, significantly reducing model convergence time; optimized acoustic modeling techniques for improved accuracy in noisy environments.
Software Engineer Intern at Samsung Research America
May 1, 2014 - December 31, 2014
Engineered a distributed deep learning engine on a GPGPU cluster, which was subsequently adopted for internal R&D projects; conducted research on model parallelism to handle large-scale neural networks.
Research Engineer at KAIST Institute
January 1, 2009 - May 31, 2012
Designed and implemented algorithms for powerless communication using HDL/Verilog; developed deformation-based gesture interaction systems integrating sensors, gyroscopes, and accelerometers.
Lecturer at MIT (IAP@Gridspace)
January 1, 2024 - March 31, 2024
Winter 2024: Large Language Models (LLMs).
Lecturer at MIT (IAP@Gridspace)
January 1, 2023 - March 31, 2023
Winter 2023: Spoken Language Processing.
Project Coordinator at Stanford University (CS224S)
March 1, 2020 - May 31, 2020
Spring 2020: Spoken Language Processing.
Teaching Assistant at Carnegie Mellon University (18-645)
September 1, 2014 - December 31, 2014
Fall 2014: How To Write Fast Code.
Teaching Assistant at Carnegie Mellon University (18-751)
September 1, 2013 - December 31, 2013
Fall 2013: Speech Recognition and Understanding.

Education

Ph.D. Program in Electrical and Computer Engineering (Discontinued) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
January 1, 2012 - January 1, 2015
M.S. in Electrical Engineering at KAIST
January 1, 2007 - January 1, 2009
B.E. in Radio Communications Engineering at Korea University
January 1, 2003 - January 1, 2007
Ph.D. Program in Electrical and Computer Engineering (Discontinued) at Carnegie Mellon University
January 1, 2012 - January 1, 2015
M.S. in Electrical Engineering at KAIST
January 1, 2007 - January 1, 2009
B.E. in Radio Communications Engineering at Korea University
January 1, 2003 - January 1, 2007
Ph.D. Program in Electrical and Computer Engineering (Discontinued) at Carnegie Mellon University
January 1, 2012 - January 1, 2015
M.S. in Electrical Engineering at KAIST
January 1, 2007 - January 1, 2009
B.E. in Radio Communications Engineering at Korea University
January 1, 2003 - January 1, 2007

Qualifications

Add your qualifications or awards here.

Industry Experience

Software & Internet, Healthcare, Education, Professional Services, Media & Entertainment