Summary
Yaran Fan is a Senior Machine Learning Scientist based in the Greater Seattle Area with 10 years of experience building ML solutions across software, finance, media, and telecommunications. Currently at Microsoft, Yaran focuses on speech processing, contextual bandits, and reinforcement learning, blending research-grade methods with production engineering. Prior roles at Amazon and IDT emphasize time-series forecasting, seasonality detection, and large-scale predictive modeling, showing a strong track record in both operational and experimental settings. Yaran’s background spans NLP, image recognition, and forecasting, and he routinely bridges statistical modeling with scalable engineering implementations. Educated at Columbia, Duke, and Zhejiang University, he brings academic rigor to pragmatic product problems. Colleagues would note his unusual combination of deep RL experience applied to real-world contextual decision systems.
10 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Arts - MA, Master of Arts - MA at Duke University
Master of Science - MS, Master of Science - MS at Columbia University in the City of New York
Bachelor of Arts - BA, Bachelor of Arts - BA at Zhejiang University
English, Chinese, Japanese