Minsu Kang Head of Engineering

Code you wrote yesterday is running today at Incheon Airport's lounge

“There are only a handful of places in Korea where you can build cloud robotics end to end. Li.fizz is one of them.”

Li.fizz's core engineer. From web, app, firmware, backend, and infrastructure all the way to mechanical and circuit design — almost every technical layer that goes into the product.

Q. Could you introduce yourself?

Hello, I'm Minsu Kang, Head of Engineering at Li.fizz. Four years of hands-on development experience. At Li.fizz I cover web, app, firmware, backend, infrastructure, all the way through mechanical and circuit design — almost every technical layer that goes into the product. From the app the owners use to a single line of circuit on the robot in the store, all of it is our team's responsibility.

Q. What exactly do you work on at Li.fizz?

I'm responsible for the full breadth of Li.fizz product development. To unpack:

• Robot control firmware — the precise motion control that lets our bartender robot make a drink in 3 seconds
• Mechanical / circuit design — the robot's physical structure and PCB circuits, all in-house. We even design our own actuator (the PCB Stator Motor) and our own controller chipset (the L1 Chip)
• Cloud robotics system — connecting 1,400 stores' robots to the cloud in real time, with OTA updates pushing remote feature improvements
• Data analytics backend — infrastructure that collects and analyzes per-store revenue, menu popularity, and stock status in real time
• Owner app and admin — the entire UX for viewing operations data, getting menu recommendations, and requesting after-service
• AI auto-ordering solution (in development) — AI that auto-orders bases based on store data
• AI-Agent-based in-house dev infrastructure — more on this in the next question

Our product packs web + app + firmware + backend + infrastructure + mechanical design + circuit design into a single product. Building all of these from zero to one in-house — vertical integration — is our biggest technical differentiator. That means you can go deep in any one technical domain, *and* see how every layer fuses into the finished product.

Q. What brought you to Li.fizz?

At my previous company I was doing ordinary web development. I was good at it but, honestly, it had become a little dull. The feeling of "I can't see where the code I write actually ends up."

I first heard of Li.fizz at a Nuguna Holdak Banhan Dak store. I saw a bartender robot working there and thought, "Who built this?" I looked it up. On the careers page it said, "We work on everything from web to circuit design." That one line hooked me. The next week I had a meeting; the next month I joined.

Q. I hear the engineering team has a distinctive way of working.

Yes — we build and use an in-house, AI-Agent-based development infrastructure. That's one of the biggest differentiators on our team.

Think about it. Our product spans from web all the way to circuit design. With traditional software methodology, no single engineer can master every domain. The usual answer is to split the team finely as the company grows, hire more people, and create silos per domain. But the moment you do that, our biggest advantage — "every layer fuses organically inside a single product" — collapses.

So we went the other direction from the start. We built our own development infrastructure that leans hard on AI Agents. That makes it possible for one engineer to write firmware in the morning, build a backend API in the afternoon, and review a circuit schematic alongside a mechanical drawing the next day. AI assists, and a person's ability scales quickly across multiple domains. One person can deep-dive into more technical fields, more deeply.

So one of our team's core jobs is building the harness and governance system for AI Agents inside our engineering org. Which models go where, where automation is allowed and where a human must verify, how we automatically guard code/circuit quality and security — this meta-infrastructure is the true core of our team. It's not just plugging in off-the-shelf AI tooling; it's designing the AI development environment itself for our team. There aren't many companies in Korea where you can touch this kind of work directly.

Q. What's the most challenging moment you've had?

By far, the Pulmuone Incheon Airport SkyHub Lounge launch. It's a 24/7, no-downtime environment. A single firmware bug can stop lounge operations. If something breaks at 3 a.m. in a store, you fix it remotely, on the spot.

That made us build the OTA update system to be genuinely robust. Even when robots across 1,400 stores update at once, we can safely roll back, and we schedule updates to land in the dead of night, outside business hours. Building infrastructure like this end to end, from firmware to cloud, is a real asset for an engineer. There aren't many companies in Korea where you can have a comparable experience.

Q. What's the team culture like?

Pretty free. With the caveat that autonomy comes with responsibility. PR reviews are strict here, and we hold a high bar on quality for both code and circuits. The fact that once merged, the code ships — and once produced, the board runs in real stores — keeps us serious.

Professor Dongjin Lee is with us as an external technical advisor. When really hard hardware, firmware, or chipset issues come up, we debug them together. Twenty-five years of his know-how is itself one of our team's biggest assets.

Q. Who would you like to work with?

Four things.

People who don't draw boundaries. Our team needs one person to cover multiple layers. Frontend-only, backend-only, firmware-only, circuit-only engineers are all welcome — what matters is the stance "if needed, I'll learn the other areas." Honestly, working across multiple areas is much more fun than holding only one.

People who are friendly to AI-driven development. We use AI Agents deeply. We fit better with "I want to use AI well so one person can do more, more deeply" than "I need to type every line of code by hand without AI." Even better if you're interested in designing the harness or governance for AI Agents with us.

People motivated by impact. Code you wrote yesterday, a circuit you designed yesterday, is running in 1,400 stores today. In Pulmuone's Incheon Airport lounge. At Norang Chicken. At Q-Q Sushi. If you love that sensation, you'll really enjoy our company.

People with strong fundamentals. Understanding operating systems, networks, and data structures deeply will, in the end, carry you further than knowing five trendy frameworks. We deal with everything from firmware to cloud to AI, and that turns out to be very true here.

Q. Finally, a word to those considering the engineering team.

There are only a handful of places in Korea where you can build cloud robotics end to end — firmware, circuits, mechanical, backend, AI infrastructure. Li.fizz is one of them. If you feel "writing only software has become a little dull," if you want "to write code that changes the physical world," or if you want "AI not as a simple tool but as the very way our team works," we'll be a great fit. See you on the careers page.