Nick Liu
Staff AI Engineer at HerculesAI
Fayetteville, Arkansas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNick Liu is a Staff AI Engineer with 15+ years of hands-on experience architecting and shipping production ML systems across big tech and education startups, currently driving AI at HerculesAI from Fayetteville, Arkansas. He has deep expertise in large-scale embeddings, retrieval and ranking, and ad/search relevance—having built billion-sample, multi-GPU text-to-image embedding models at Pinterest and core ad retrieval systems at Apple that supported a $500M business. At CK-12 he translated advanced NLP models into practical K-12 tutoring features, including a math QA system with 90% top-3 accuracy and cost-optimized coreference for chatbots. Trained as a mathematician and PhD-level statistician, he blends rigorous quantitative foundations with pragmatic engineering to deliver measurable business impact (e.g., improving search relevance and ads revenue). Notably, he routinely bridges research and production—optimizing model parallelism, inference efficiency, and storage to make large models operational at scale.
10 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree Mathematics, Bachelor's degree Mathematics at Peking UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Statistics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Statistics at University of Pennsylvania - The Wharton SchoolMathematics, Mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis
Github Skills (58)
cntk10
retrieval9
summarization9
text-generation9
vp-tree9
pytorch9
squad9
java9
python9
machine-learning9
information-retrieval9
string-matching9
question-answering9
korean-nlp9
transfer-learning9
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
nliu86/Fixed-length-vector-predictor-for-text
Dec 2015 - Feb 2017
Contributions:12 commits, 11 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 2 months
nliu86/word2vec-doc2vec
Dec 2015 - Feb 2017
Contributions:16 commits, 15 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 2 months
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