Yao Zhou
Senior Software Engineer at Google
Sunnyvale, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolYao Zhou is a Senior Software Engineer with 11 years of experience specializing in recommender systems, personalization, crowdsourcing, human-in-the-loop learning, and federated and explainable ML. He holds advanced degrees culminating in PhD-level work at UIUC and has applied research-grade approaches to production problems at Instacart and Walmart Labs before joining Google. His work spans end-to-end personalization — from multi-source retrieval and contextual-bandit ranking to GAN- and PU-based matrix factorization — demonstrating both research depth and product impact. Based in Sunnyvale, he blends academic rigor with practical engineering, often surfacing interpretable models and human feedback loops to improve recommendations. An understated strength is his cross-domain fluency, having transitioned techniques from biomedical signal classification to large-scale retail personalization.
11 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Master's Degree Computer Science, Master's Degree Computer Science at Oregon State UniversityMaster's Degree Electrical and Computer Engineering, Master's Degree Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of RochesterDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
English, Chinese
Github Skills (8)
collaborative-filtering4
autoencoder4
hyphenation4
deep-learning3
filtering3
recommender-system3
neural-network2
machine-learning2
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
collwe/JEDI-Crowd-Teaching
Jan 2018 - Jan 2019
Contributions:34 commits, 19 pushes, 1 comment in 1 year
collwe/Review-Based-Explainable-Recommendations
Feb 2022 - Aug 2024
Contributions:42 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 6 months
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.