Justin Basilico
Principal Engineer - Discover at Google
Los Gatos, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJustin Basilico is a principal engineer and seasoned machine learning leader with over two decades of experience building personalization and recommender systems at scale, most recently shaping discovery at Google after leading recommendation algorithm teams at Netflix. He combines deep research pedigree and hands-on engineering—bringing collaborative filtering, learning-to-rank, deep learning, bandits and transformers from lab to production for hundreds of millions of users. Justin excels at end-to-end systems: designing models, instrumenting large-scale experiments, deploying real-time ranking, and evolving the infrastructure that powers personalized experiences. He’s driven cross-functional R&D to integrate LLMs and generative techniques into recommendation surfaces, with a practical focus on human-aligned, trustworthy agents and natural language interfaces. Known for bridging research, product, and strategy, he mentors teams to move fast without sacrificing rigor and has a track record of operationalizing novel ML methods in high-stakes production environments. Based in Los Gatos, he pairs academic roots (M.S. Brown University) with decades of industrial impact across national labs and consumer tech.
15 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
M.S. Computer Science, M.S. Computer Science at Brown UniversityH.S., H.S. at Milton AcademyB.A. Computer Science, B.A. Computer Science at Pomona College
Github Skills (14)
algorithm10
oop10
statistics10
machine-learning10
artificial-intelligence10
information-retrieval10
linear-algebra10
java10
drawing8
canvas7
collaboration7
visualization7
whiteboard5
sketching3
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
jbasilico/Foundry
May 2015 - Mar 2017
The Cognitive Foundry is an open-source Java library for building intelligent systems
Contributions:35 commits, 65 pushes, 14 branches in 1 year 10 months
java
algorithmfoundry/Foundry
Aug 2011 - Dec 2020
The Cognitive Foundry is an open-source Java library for building intelligent systems using machine learning
Contributions:6 releases, 2 reviews, 343 commits in 9 years 6 months
javamachine-learningartificial-intelligencelinear-algebrastatistics
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