Sam Kenny
Staff Software Engineer at Figma
Berkeley, California, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolSam Kenny is a Staff Software Engineer based in Berkeley with nine years of experience applying machine learning to marketplace search, ranking, and personalization. He transitioned from PhD research in superresolution microscopy at UC Berkeley to industry, bringing strong quantitative rigor and experience building full-stack ML pipelines and server-side models. At Faire he led Query Understanding and Retrieval, advancing neural IR, semantic search ensembles, and multi-objective retrieval strategies to boost relevance across key query segments. Now at Figma, he continues to bridge research and product engineering, scaling sophisticated search and recommendation systems for product-facing teams. Sam combines deep experimental design skills from the lab with production ML engineering, and he’s comfortable translating complex models into reliable online services. An underappreciated strength is his background in STORM imaging, which honed his ability to extract signal from noisy, high-dimensional data—useful for ranking and personalization.
9 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Physical Chemistry, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Physical Chemistry at University of California, BerkeleyBachelor’s Degree Chemistry, Bachelor’s Degree Chemistry at University of MinnesotaGithub contributions (5)
sjkenny/clustering
May 2017 - Feb 2018
Contributions:7 commits, 4 pushes, 1 branch in 10 months
sjkenny/ransac
May 2017 - Feb 2018
Contributions:2 pushes, 1 branch in 10 months
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