Summary
Nicholas Kong is a Staff Machine Learning Engineer with 11 years of experience building production ML systems that blend big-data engineering, UX and information visualization. He’s led cross-functional teams at LinkedIn and Airbnb on projects from scalable LLM distillation and topic generation to on‑prem capacity forecasting and model health monitoring that materially reduced detection time and cost. At YouTube and Google he shipped music-understanding models, the industry’s early federated learning deployment, and tooling for Knowledge Graph curation, pairing algorithmic depth with polished user-facing tooling. Trained as a CS PhD from UC Berkeley, he brings a research mindset to pragmatic engineering and a knack for surfacing signal from large, messy datasets. Based in South San Francisco, he combines infra-scale thinking with a UX-first approach that helps teams deploy models people actually trust and use.
11 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Computer Science, PhD, Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley
BASc, Engineering Science - Computer Option, BASc, Engineering Science - Computer Option at University of Toronto
English