Jiazhen Xie
Manager Of Machine Learning at Canva
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJiazhen Xie is a pragmatic engineering leader with 11 years’ experience building and scaling backend and ML-enabled products, now managing Machine Learning teams at Canva in London. He has a track record of turning around dysfunctional teams, ramping new squads from 0→1, and improving delivery velocity and efficiency—once cutting infrastructure costs from $2K to $300 per month and driving a project that generated £17K. Comfortable across disciplines, he’s shipped ML models that raised prediction accuracy from 65% to 85%, led SaaS billing and entitlement platforms to multi-million ARR, and mentors engineers through clear growth plans. An active open-source contributor, he’s extended Ruby’s Pundit library with improved error handling and tests, reflecting his attention to reliability and maintainability. Jiazhen blends hands-on technical craft with a people-first management philosophy—“treat people the way you want to be treated”—and a penchant for pragmatic, cost-effective solutions.
11 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
master, Computer Software Engineering, master, Computer Software Engineering at University of OxfordMaster of Computer Science, Computer Science, Master of Computer Science, Computer Science at University of BirminghamBachelor of Science (BSc), Management Information Systems, General, Bachelor of Science (BSc), Management Information Systems, General at Northwest A&F University
English, Chinese, Chinese
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (7)
testing10
pundit10
error-handling10
authorizations10
authorization10
ruby10
ruby-on-rails6
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
varvet/pundit
Feb 2017 - Feb 2017
Minimal authorization through OO design and pure Ruby classes
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 3 PRs, 7 comments in 1 day
Contributions summary:Jiazhen primarily focused on enhancing the Pundit authorization library by introducing a new error type, `InvalidConstructorError`, and implementing thorough testing for it. They expanded test coverage across multiple areas, including policy constructors, policy scopes, and controller authorization methods. Furthermore, they refined the code by adding checks and raising the `InvalidConstructorError` when policy and policy_scope constructors raise ArgumentErrors, as well as documenting the new error type.
authorizationruby
JIAZHEN/structure-algorithm
Feb 2016 - Nov 2020
Contributions:34 pushes, 1 branch in 4 years 9 months
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