Sheng Zha is a Senior Applied Science Manager based in San Jose with a decade of experience building and leading large-scale foundation model training and acceleration efforts at Amazon and AWS. He combines hands-on systems and ML engineering—contributions to projects like Apache MXNet, Gluon-NLP, and mshadow show deep expertise in build systems, distributed training, and CUDA/C++ libraries—with product-focused applied science that powered services such as CodeWhisperer, Lex, Comprehend, and Kendra. As a founding member of the Python Data API Standards consortium and former Apache MXNet PMC chair, he blends open-source stewardship with enterprise delivery. Sheng’s background spans scalable ML platforms, RLHF and LLM pre-training, and low-level performance work such as OpenBLAS and MKL integration, reflecting both research and production chops. Colleagues describe him as a manager who still dives into build scripts and model fine-tuning, a habit that keeps teams technically grounded. He holds advanced CS training from the University of Maryland and an appetite for pragmatic, cross-layer optimizations that accelerate foundation models.
10 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Non-degree Computer Science, Non-degree Computer Science at The University of New Mexico
Master's degree Computer Science, Master's degree Computer Science at University of Maryland
Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Lightweight, Portable, Flexible Distributed/Mobile Deep Learning with Dynamic, Mutation-aware Dataflow Dep Scheduler; for Python, R, Julia, Scala, Go, Javascript and more
Role in this project:
Backend Engineer & Build Engineer
Contributions:4 releases, 270 reviews, 305 commits in 5 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Sheng's primary contribution centers around the build process and dependency management for the MXNet deep learning framework. They developed and modified scripts to build OpenBLAS, manage PS-Lite dependencies, configure S3 access, and build image libraries. Furthermore, they created scripts for creating the build and wheel packages, indicating a focus on ensuring the framework's compatibility and ease of use in different environments. The user also worked on updating build scripts and ensuring compatibility with MacOS.
Contributions:4 releases, 90 reviews, 154 commits in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Sheng primarily focused on code improvements related to the `gluon-nlp/data` and `gluonnlp/model` modules, addressing code style and bug fixes. The contributions include updates to the linting process, modifications to sampling methods, and fixes for vocabulary serialization issues, demonstrating involvement in data processing and model architecture. The user also participated in documentation updates, indicating a focus on code quality and maintainability.
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Sheng Zha - Senior Applied Science Manager at Amazon