Recap. 2025
A year-end retrospective on 2025 — what I experienced, what I lacked, and what I learned from mistakes.
🇰🇷 한국어 버전은 여기에서 확인할 수 있습니다.
- 1. 2024: Crisis for the Team and the Community
- 2. 2025: A New Team and Growth
- 3. Closing: Here’s How I Plan to Keep Growing
Hello. A lot happened between 2024 and 2025. I’d like to look back and share my own retrospective.
1. 2024: Crisis for the Team and the Community
In 2024, while I was busy growing alongside the launch of Project Widearth, my company (MAXST) ran into difficulties and I ended up leaving the team. I had wanted to grow more within that team, but after careful consideration of various circumstances, I decided to move on. I was separated from colleagues I had worked with for years and faced the big challenge of finding a new team. Still, I made the most of a rare period of rest — taking care of my health, keeping a calm mind, and focusing on applications and interviews.
Career
(MLOps/DevOps Engineer)
Challenges
- Job searching after resignation
- Company in turmoil, country in turmoil
Then in December, a state of emergency martial law was declared in South Korea. My sense is that this triggered a wave of hiring freezes and I received many rejection notices as a result. My own skills were also lacking, but I believe the political climate had a significant impact as well. I kept studying to fill the gaps. I also did everything I could to protect the community. Going through something I never imagined would happen in my lifetime — something that seemed impossible in the 21st century, something only found in history books — made me viscerally feel how difficult it is to live without a stable country and economy.
Fortunately, the people I care about and my family gave me the strength to keep going without giving up on finding a new job. Until the very last day of December, I gave my best to everything within my reach. I did what I could in the streets, and at home I spent my time polishing my resume rather than reflecting. That was how I closed out the year I left my first workplace. Even so, with the support of family and friends, I held on well and kept hoping for good news.
2024 was the hardest year of my life. It was also the year I received the most help from others. I am deeply grateful to everyone who stood by us. Thank you all for your perseverance. 🤝
2. 2025: A New Team and Growth
2025 was a year of recovery for me. Remarkably, many things stabilized quickly. I’m grateful to be able to look back on those days like this.
Career
(AI/MLOps Engineer)
Project
(AI Architect)
Challenges
- Adapting and delivering results after my first job change
- Hands-on work and tech lead for Generative AI projects
- Planning to expand Generative AI initiatives going forward
2.1. New Team, New Colleagues
It wasn’t until early February, when I received the offer and made the decision to join, that I could finally breathe again. I’m grateful that my experience and potential were held in high regard.
In February 2025, I joined the Hyundai AutoEver Dev Environment Platform Team. It’s the ICT arm of the Hyundai Motor Group, and I was delighted to return to the automotive field that I had been deeply immersed in during my graduate studies. Our team supports the software development environment for automotive technology — something I had experienced firsthand during my time as a researcher.
Being part of a large corporation means you can make bold new attempts on top of a stable foundation. However, as projects mature, a strong lock-in effect tends to develop, tying individuals to specific tasks. To keep growing, I need to take on more challenges than I did at a startup, while also improving stability.
I met great colleagues. My previous workplace had many people with similar career stages and ages, but the new team has colleagues across all experience levels, which allowed me to share and absorb a wide range of experiences. Everyone was relaxed and highly skilled. With their help, I was able to adapt quickly. I drank a lot of coffee. ☕️
The Dev Environment Platform Team is an organization within the Hyundai Motor Group that supplies collaboration tools for automotive software development:
- Commercial Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools like Codebeamer for integrated management of requirements, issues, and testing,
- Popular commercial SW collaboration tools such as GitLab, Jira, and Confluence,
- BitWinHub, an in-house automation tool for integrating SW development platforms (internally developed)
These form the toolchain provided to the organization.
I was now able to work at the intersection of the automotive field I had been deeply involved with since graduate school and the DevOps domain focused on supporting people and platforms. Experiences that had been evaluated in pieces during other interviews all came together here as a cohesive set of career assets. Being recognized in that way only made me want to contribute more to the new company.
Over the past 10 months, I’ve been able to learn the culture of a group company where thousands of people work together, share my experience, and contribute to the team in my own way. Being a manufacturing-based company with a long history, it had a different scale and set of pros and cons compared to an agile startup. I also got to hear a lot about the pride and struggles of my teammates. I felt genuinely proud that people listened to the ideas and insights I brought to the table.
2.2. New Role, New Project
I joined as a mid-level engineer. Based on my experience in DevOps and Generative AI, I was assigned the role of maintaining and improving the team’s platform. After a brief adjustment period and through a process of role refinement, my responsibilities became more focused on Generative AI projects. My existing DevOps skills also proved useful since we were aiming for live services. (I later received feedback that it was great having someone who could wear multiple hats.)
I joined a part of over 10 members, within a group of 4. The first project I was assigned to was “Driving the PoC for an AI assistant to support Codebeamer.” As a group of four, we worked together on the following:
- Reviewing the target platform and Generative AI technologies
- Developing AI agents and designing the UI
- Data preprocessing and building a knowledge-base training pipeline
- Code review, CI/CD, and monitoring setup
As the AI Architect, I worked alongside team members who had limited Generative AI project experience, sharing my knowledge and growing together. Along the way, we successfully overcame both project management and technical challenges. After about 6 months of hands-on work, we conducted an internal beta test and wrapped up the PoC successfully. We built up the planning capabilities and technical stack needed to drive AI projects going into 2026.
2.3. The Pressure of a First Job Change
There were colleagues who advised me from the very start not to try too hard, and I knew I was the type who could easily fall into impostor syndrome. But before I knew it, I was caught in an unsustainable routine. I was waking up early, studying on the bus on my way to work, proposing and driving various initiatives, communicating to be a good colleague, asking for feedback, and coming home to find more things to do.
This is a fine routine for a growing professional, but I took it too far. After pushing through the first half of 2025 this way, I did manage to make a good first impression and deliver consistent results. I received positive feedback at year-end as well, but my body had taken a toll over that short period. As project involvement and work requests will only increase, pacing myself is absolutely essential.
Lately, I’ve been trying to leverage Generative AI for work automation — doing more in the same amount of time. Come in early, leave early.
2.4. Regrets and the Path Forward
Through last year’s AI project, I was able to implement a successful GenAI service development cycle in a short period of time. Of course, there were a few things I wish had gone better.
⏩ Speed Is Everything
📝 Validate with Results
🤝 Collaboration
I believe that addressing these areas in my personal capabilities will lead to excellent project execution and teamwork:
- Execution was fast, but I was obsessed with perfection.
- Issue: Initial implementation was completed quickly, but I stuck to incrementally improving the existing framework rather than pivoting to improve results.
- Solution: Build flexible plans and iterate quickly based on data.
- Examples: Rebuilding the knowledge base, changing the tech stack, etc.
- Going forward: Drawing from AWS’s ‘innovate faster’ principle to pursue planning and implementation that enables rapid iteration.
- I lacked the process of persuading through results.
- Issue: When technical decisions beyond the original plan were needed, I had no working demo to show teammates. Not having prepared these in advance meant decision-making consumed a lot of time.
- Solution: When exploring AI technologies like RAG, MCP, and A2A, prepare examples in advance.
- Examples: A working technical portfolio deployed on internal cloud
- Going forward: Build and continuously update a technical portfolio. It can serve as a tool for decision-making and also as onboarding material.
- I could have done better on UX for collaboration.
- Issue: I wrote solid code for data processing and evaluation, but didn’t build a UI to share it and gather feedback. This created a structure that relied solely on result reports and made it hard to share results in real time. Even small updates required rebuilding the source code.
- Solution: AI makes it easy to build disposable apps. FE/BE/DB can be designed for fast collaboration and decision-making.
- Examples: Knowledge-base search performance evaluation UI, expert evaluation UI, AI demo tools
- Going forward: I’ll boldly build disposable tools whenever collaboration calls for it. I expect productivity to increase 3–4x compared to before.
3. Closing: Here’s How I Plan to Keep Growing
I plan to keep doing what I did last year (2025). That means deepening my automotive SW domain knowledge in the new team and becoming more seasoned in hands-on work and collaboration. I also plan to further spread Generative AI within the team and company, applying it to work to expand productivity without limits.
💪 Grind in the Work
🦾 Leveraging Generative AI
🤝 Collaboration
🏥 Health Management
Because I always dream of being a staff engineer who works hands-on and solves technical problems directly, I will keep learning and engaging with others to maintain my practical skills. I’ll gratefully take on the opportunities that come my way, share good opportunities with others, and grow together. No one works alone. Every day, I’ll strive to be a colleague who is great to work with. And to do that, I need to take care of my health too. This year (2026), I’ll commit to exercising consistently.
Thank you for reading.
