Jacob Gao
Engineering Manager at Pinterest
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJacob Gao is an engineering manager in San Francisco with 11 years of experience applying machine learning and database techniques to ads targeting and candidate generation at scale. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University, where his research explored solving large-scale ML problems using a relational database approach—an uncommon intersection that he continues to bring to production systems. At Pinterest he led teams building personalized and semantic retrieval for ads, translating research-grade models into high-throughput serving stacks. His early work spans systems and recommender problems at Facebook, Pandora, and Microsoft Research Asia, giving him deep experience in resource-aware distributed systems and temporal/graph-based recommendations. Known for bridging rigorous academic methods and pragmatic engineering, he often focuses on making complex model pipelines robust and efficient in real-world advertising environments.
10 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science at Rice UniversityBachelor of Engineering Computer Science, Bachelor of Engineering Computer Science at Zhejiang University
English, Chinese
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (15)
hive10
sql-query10
presto10
sql10
java10
database10
trino9
hadoop9
query-engine9
spark9
big-data9
heap-memory6
stochastic5
heap4
analytics2
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
jacobgao/presto
Jun 2015 - Aug 2015
Contributions:123 pushes, 11 branches in 2 months
querysourcesanalyticsquery-enginemysql
jacobgao/mljoin
Apr 2016 - Nov 2016
Contributions:20 pushes in 6 months
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