Professional experience, talks, and papers
Here’s an overview of my professional experience; scroll down for talks and papers.
| 2017–present | Head of Machine Learning Platforms at Pinterest. I founded this team and grew it to 25 engineers and managers. It includes Signals, ML Training, and ML Serving. It’s used by 200 engineers throughout the company for 40+ ML use cases such as Home, Search, Related Pins, Shopping, Ads. |
| 2015–2017 | Started the Related Pins recommendations team at Pinterest. As tech lead, and later engineering manager, I led the team to improve relevance/personalization using ML ranking and build new product features, growing the surface to 40% of site-wide engagement. |
| 2013–2014 | Was one of the founding engineers at VisualGraph, a computer vision startup acquired by Pinterest. Formed the Pinterest Visual Search team, where I built foundational infrastructure for analyzing all Pinterest images with ML models. |
| 2007–2010 | I’ve been exploring machine learning since high school, doing science fair projects in music analysis, speech recognition, and computer vision. |
| 2008–2013 | High school and college internships with NASA Ames Research Center, Facebook, Google, Palantir, D. E. Shaw & Co. |
| 2003–2008 | I first started doing freelance contract programming work at age 11 as “DCLsoft.” |
See also my LinkedIn.
Talks and papers
Talk: Evolution and Unification of Pinterest ML Platform (2021)
Talk at apply() Conference, April 21, 2021. (10 minutes)
Pinterest Related Pins Recommendations
I worked on Pinterest Related Pins 2015–2017, as tech lead and later as engineering manager. In 2017 we published this paper at the World Wide Web conference…
Pinterest Visual Search
In 2014, I built infrastructure for image feature extraction and object detection at scale to power visual search at Pinterest. We published a paper at KDD 2…