James Li
Senior ML Engineering Manager at Pinterest
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Li is a Senior ML Engineering Manager in the San Francisco Bay Area with 12 years of experience building large-scale recommendation and ranking systems across consumer platforms. He has driven measurable product turnarounds—most recently leading Snap’s Stories ranking efforts to convert declining metrics into 30% year-over-year growth—and now oversees early-stage ranking and new-user enablement at Pinterest for over 500 million monthly users. With a PhD in Statistics from Cornell and deep cross-modal ML expertise (vision, text, audio, graphs), he combines research rigor with product-focused engineering, having shipped systems that grew views and reduced user reports by double digits. He also has a consistent record improving content integrity and user sentiment at Facebook, plus experience building labeling and indexing infrastructure that serves multiple orgs. Notably, James bridges academic methods and pragmatic graph-based solutions, often turning sparse labels into high-impact signals for large production systems.
12 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
B.A Statistics Applied Mathematics Economics, B.A Statistics Applied Mathematics Economics at University of California, BerkeleyPh.D. Statistics, Ph.D. Statistics at Cornell University
English, ChineseGithub contributions (2)
cran/rTensor
Jan 2014 - Mar 2020
Contributions:7 commits in 6 years 2 months
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