Summary
Jackie Zhang is a Tech Lead Manager based in the Bay Area with nine years of experience building scalable data and AI systems across startups and large cloud platforms. Currently leading the data platform at Contextual.ai, she architects agentic data extraction, multimodal document understanding, and knowledge representation to power enterprise context layers and RL-tuned LLM agent planning. Her background includes production engineering at Databricks and research roles at Alibaba Cloud and the University of Michigan, giving her a strong blend of applied research and production ML/infra expertise. As a founder of ReactiveXYZ she’s mentored and enabled student developers to turn ideas into products, reflecting a longstanding commitment to education and early-stage innovation. Jackie’s academic path—MS in CS from Columbia and ongoing doctoral engineering work at Purdue—underscores a persistent curiosity that fuels both deep technical design and pragmatic delivery.
9 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science and Data Science, 3.77, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science and Data Science, 3.77 at University of Michigan
High School, VCE, Australia, ATAR 99.25., High School, VCE, Australia, ATAR 99.25. at University High School, Melbourne
Master of Science - MS, Computer Science, 4.07, Master of Science - MS, Computer Science, 4.07 at Columbia University in the City of New York
Doctor's Degree, ENGINEERING, Doctor's Degree, ENGINEERING at Purdue University