Ármin Hamp
founding engineer · builder · san francisco
About
I'm a software engineer based in San Francisco, currently building as a founding engineer at Surreal, where we're using AI to make the internet safer. Before that, I spent four years at Apple working on backend systems that served millions of schools worldwide.
My path has taken me from Beijing to Buenos Aires, Tokyo to Silicon Valley — each stop shaped how I think about building software. I studied Computer Science and Philosophy at Minerva University — a school with no lectures, no traditional campus, and an acceptance rate under 2% at the time. Over four years, I lived in San Francisco, Seoul, Hyderabad, Berlin, Buenos Aires, London, and Taipei, studying in each city and embedding in local communities. It was the kind of education that teaches you to think clearly and adapt fast, no matter where you are.
I care about building things that matter. I'm drawn to hard problems at the intersection of AI and product — and I believe the best software is built by small teams moving fast with strong convictions.
The Journey
Founding Engineer @ Surreal
San Francisco · 2025 — PresentBuilding an AI-powered platform from prototype to production that auto-discovers and takes down harmful social media content at scale. Designing agentic workflow architecture using LLM APIs for content discovery, classification, and actioning.
Software Engineer @ Apple
Sunnyvale · 2021 — 2025Developed high-throughput data ingestion for Apple School Manager, processing 10M+ records daily. Automated Student Information System imports and led a team of 6 engineers as Scrum Master.
Software Engineer @ Masason AI Lab
Tokyo · 2020 — 2021Led a team to build a Computer Vision web-app from scratch to MVP in 10 weeks. Designed backend in Flask with PostgreSQL, deployed on Google Cloud Run. Cut response times from 30s to 5s with async processing.
ML Engineer @ Satellogic
Buenos Aires · 2020Trained and benchmarked object detection models for aircraft detection on satellite imagery. Built data pre-processing pipelines for 10,000+ satellite images using AWS SageMaker.
University Relations @ ByteDance
Beijing · 2018Represented ByteDance AI Lab at international conferences. Organized events for 100+ academic invitees and a coding bootcamp with 500+ participants.
B.Sc. Computer Science & Philosophy @ Minerva University
7 countries · 2017 — 2021No lectures, no traditional campus. Every class was a live, active seminar with fewer than 20 students. Lived and studied across San Francisco, Seoul, Hyderabad, Berlin, Buenos Aires, London, and Taipei. Consistently ranked among the most selective and innovative universities in the world.