Yifan Yang is a senior machine learning and software engineer with nine years of experience building large-scale ML systems, ads ranking models, and production data pipelines for companies including TikTok, Meta, xAI, Airbnb, and Microsoft Research Asia. He combines research-grade ML (pretraining and LLM work on projects like Seed-thinking-1.5 and llama4) with pragmatic engineering—designing high-throughput C++/Java backends, streaming/batch pipelines, and production-ready ranking and ad-delivery systems that moved two-digit revenue improvements. A Carnegie Mellon MS graduate with strong ML research roots, he has a track record of shipping end-to-end solutions from model pretraining to SFT and RLHF, and has experience improving model efficiency, distillation, and reproducibility at scale. Notably, his background spans both contest-style algorithmic problem solving and hands-on contributions to open frameworks during internships, reflecting rare breadth across low-level systems, large-scale ML, and product impact.
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