Violet Yao
Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Apple
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolViolet Yao is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer with seven years of experience building production ML systems and developer tools across Apple, Stanford SAIL, and Berkeley AI Research. She combines research-driven innovations—like speeding up beam search and interpretable multi-hop reasoning—with hands-on engineering, shipping features from outage alerting at Red Hat to a pip-installable data pipeline for Lawrence Berkeley Lab. At Apple she focuses on post-training foundation models and search/LLM work, and her open-source contributions include backend refactors and test enhancements for the high-profile Salesforce VS Code extensions and data loaders for the fastNLP framework. Comfortable bridging research and product, she brings proven expertise in scalable Python engineering, NLP, and developer tooling, plus a knack for cleaning up complex codepaths to improve reliability and observability.
7 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree Computer Science & Data Science, Bachelor's degree Computer Science & Data Science at University of California, BerkeleyMaster's degree Computer Science, Master's degree Computer Science at Stanford University
Github Skills (17)
python10
typescript10
nlpjs10
vscode-extension10
data-loading10
apex10
natural-language-processing10
typescript-types10
text-processing10
nlp10
typescripts10
salesforce10
debug9
debugging9
text-classification8
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
forcedotcom/salesforcedx-vscode
Jun 2021 - Aug 2021
Salesforce Extensions for VS Code
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:26 reviews, 42 commits, 30 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Violet primarily focused on refactoring and enhancing the Apex Replay Debugger, moving functions and improving code organization within the `salesforcedx-vscode` repository. They also implemented changes to the persistent storage service, improving how file properties are cached and accessed. Furthermore, the user contributed to conflict detection, enabling its functionality within the deploy process. They also updated the test side bar icon and added test coverage features.
vscode-debuggervscode-extensionlightningvscodesalesforce-developers
fastnlp/fastNLP
Jun 2019 - Jun 2019
fastNLP: A Modularized and Extensible NLP Framework. Currently still in incubation.
Role in this project:Data Scientist
Data ScientistContributions:8 commits, 1 PR in 1 day
Contributions summary:Violet primarily contributed to the development of a data loading module for the Yelp dataset. This involved creating a custom loader class to parse and prepare Yelp data for use within the fastNLP framework, including data extraction, cleaning, and formatting. Additionally, the user addressed minor issues such as comment formatting and refactoring, demonstrating a focus on data preprocessing and integration with the existing NLP framework. The user moved the relevant test file to the corresponding folder.
nlpbertword-embeddingsdeep-learningtext-processing
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.