Kai Zhang
Applied Scientist at Amazon
Berkeley, California, United States
Summary
👤
SeniorKai Zhang is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer based in Berkeley with nine years of experience building production-grade LLMs, recommendation systems, and safety-focused NLP solutions across Amazon, DiDi, and national labs. He combines deep research roots (PhD in Astrophysics) with pragmatic engineering—designing scalable LLM pretraining/post-training pipelines, RL and SFT workflows, and evaluation frameworks that drove measurable business impact like 30–48% revenue lifts and dramatic acceptance-rate improvements. Kai has led projects from safety interventions that reduced criminal rates to conversational agents and multimarket recommendation systems, often improving throughput or accuracy by an order of magnitude. Comfortable across cloud platforms, MLOps, and full-stack tooling, he also brings a knack for automating evaluators and simulators that make model metrics actionable in real environments. Notably, his transition from astrophysics to applied ML produced high-impact tooling and published science, reflecting a blend of rigorous analysis and product-oriented delivery.
9 years of coding experience
Github Skills (14)
spectral9
falcon8
bloom8
natural-language-processing7
pipeline7
text-generation7
nlp7
pytorch6
inference6
deep-learning6
data-model6
large-language-models5
gpt5
transformer5
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
zkdtc/MLC_ELGs
Jun 2019 - Jan 2021
Contributions:13 commits, 11 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 7 months
zkdtc/desi_code
Sep 2019 - Feb 2021
Contributions:46 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 4 months
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.