Derek Zhao
Lead Machine Learning Engineer at The Walt Disney Company
Spring, Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDerek Zhao is a Lead Machine Learning Engineer with 9 years of experience building and productionizing end-to-end ML systems across gaming, consumer products, and marketplace platforms. He has driven measurable business impact—most notably a $8.1M revenue uplift from a dynamic pricing algorithm at Thumbtack—and holds multiple granted patents for innovative model architectures and deployment approaches. Derek blends research-grade methods (Siamese networks, VAE, causal inference) with pragmatic engineering (Databricks, BigQuery, Vertex AI, Docker) to accelerate experimentation and model iteration—introducing interleaving to speed statistical significance 20x at Thumbtack. He is returning from a brief family-care leave with full availability and brings proven leadership in mentoring, roadmap planning, and cross-functional alignment. A classically trained composer turned data scientist, Derek pairs creative problem-solving from his music career with rigorous ML productization and explainability expertise.
9 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Postbaccalaureate Studies Mathematics and Computer Science, Postbaccalaureate Studies Mathematics and Computer Science at University of HoustonBachelor of Arts Music, Bachelor of Arts Music at University of Southern CaliforniaMaster of Science Data Science, Master of Science Data Science at Columbia University
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (10)
twitter6
speech5
flask5
python4
machine-learning3
data-mining1
spark1
data-science1
mining1
data-analysis1
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
zhao1701/amazon-movie-recommendation
Oct 2017 - Mar 2018
Contributions:34 commits, 33 pushes, 1 branch in 4 months
zhao1701/supervised-vae
Oct 2018 - Dec 2018
Contributions:64 commits, 52 pushes, 1 branch in 1 month
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