Marie Leo
Data Director, APAC
Singapore, Singapore
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMarie Leo is a Data Director for APAC who combines 15+ years of hands-on engineering with strategic leadership, currently running Sephora’s Data organization across SEA, ANZ and India. She has pioneered customer-facing generative AI at scale—building Sephora’s virtual beauty advisor—and delivered double-digit lifts from session-based recommendation engines and real-time MLOps deployments. A pragmatic builder, she led a team that doubled in size while implementing a Lambda/medallion data platform on Google Cloud with DBT, Kafka, Airflow and Kubernetes, and cut cloud spend via FinOps practices. Her background includes building ultra-low-latency ANN systems and contributing backend/MLOps integration to the well-known ann-benchmarks repo, reflecting deep expertise in embedding search and production inference. An engaging communicator and Top Voice, she publishes technical write-ups and teaches MLOps and NLP, bringing both research (ACL publication) and an IP to production. She’s equally comfortable coding in the stack and presenting to executive audiences, which helps her translate complex AI into measurable business outcomes.
8 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.), Electronics and Communication Engineering, Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.), Electronics and Communication Engineering at Pondicherry Engineering CollegeMaster of Science, Electrical Engineering, Master of Science, Electrical Engineering at National University of Singapore
Stackoverflow
246reputation
3kreached
3answers
0questions
Github Skills (21)
opensearch10
python10
nearest-neighbors10
amazon-elasticsearch10
indexing10
elasticsearchquery10
aws-elasticsearch10
elasticsearch10
elasticsearch-api10
apim9
api9
performance-tuning9
docker8
dockers8
pip6
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
erikbern/ann-benchmarks
Dec 2020 - Aug 2021
Benchmarks of approximate nearest neighbor libraries in Python
Role in this project:
Backend & MLOps Engineer
Backend & MLOps EngineerContributions:2 reviews, 20 commits, 7 PRs in 8 months
Contributions summary:Marie contributed significantly to the backend implementation of approximate nearest neighbor algorithms, specifically integrating OpenSearch (formerly OpenDistro) with the benchmarking framework. They worked on setting up, configuring, and interacting with Elasticsearch and OpenSearch, including defining mappings, data ingestion, and querying for the KNN functionality. They also focused on improving the build and installation process, managing dependencies, and optimizing performance through warmup and force-merge operations, reflecting an MLOps approach for model deployment and performance.
pythonnearest-neighbornearestdockerbenchmark
stephenleo/adventures-with-ann
Nov 2020 - Sep 2022
Contributions:22 commits, 21 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 9 months
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