Zijian Wang
Research Scientist Manager at Meta
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolZijian Wang is a research scientist manager based in the San Francisco Bay Area with nine years of experience building and leading teams that ship cutting-edge AI products and benchmarks. He was a founding scientist and later manager at AWS AI Labs where he helped build CodeWhisperer (now Amazon Q Developer and Kiro), working across pre-training, post-training, data, and evaluation for code LLMs. His background blends academic NLP research at Stanford—co-authoring EMNLP and CoNLL papers including the TalkDown corpus—with hands-on engineering contributions to high-profile open-source efforts like BIG-bench and NL-Augmenter. Zijian combines product-focused leadership with deep technical fluency in NLP transformations, dataset engineering, and model benchmarking, and he’s comfortable moving projects from research prototypes into production-scale systems. A lesser-known thread through his career is strong teaching and curriculum-building experience, from Stanford courses to a Coursera class with 220k+ enrollment, which informs his aptitude for mentorship and clear technical communication.
9 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree Electrical and Computer Engineering, Bachelor's degree Electrical and Computer Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong UniversityBachelor's degree Computer Science, Bachelor's degree Computer Science at University of MichiganMaster of Science - MS Symbolic Systems, Master of Science - MS Symbolic Systems at Stanford University
Chinese, English
Github Skills (8)
workbench10
nltk10
machine-learning10
nlp10
testbench10
python10
data-science10
text-generation9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
GEM-benchmark/NL-Augmenter
Jun 2021 - Nov 2021
NL-Augmenter 🦎 → 🐍 A Collaborative Repository of Natural Language Transformations
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer (focus on NLP & Data Science)
Full-stack Developer (focus on NLP & Data Science)Contributions:13 reviews, 49 commits, 4 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Zijian primarily contributed to the implementation of various natural language transformations within the `NL-Augmenter` repository. Their work includes the creation of transformations such as character case changes, sentence reordering, and synonym substitution. These transformations involved the use of libraries like `nltk`, `spacy` and `allennlp`, suggesting a focus on NLP techniques. The user also demonstrated proficiency in integrating new transformations into the project's existing structure.
nlpinformation-theorysentencedeep-learningmachine-learning
google/BIG-bench
May 2021 - Aug 2021
Beyond the Imitation Game collaborative benchmark for measuring and extrapolating the capabilities of language models
Role in this project:ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:13 commits, 5 PRs, 18 comments in 2 months
Contributions summary:Zijian contributed to the "TalkDown" and "Social Support" tasks within the BIG-bench benchmark. Their work involved implementing and refining tasks related to condescension detection and social support understanding, including the creation of evaluation logic and data integration. Code changes include modifications to task files, data handling, and integration within the notebook environment.
bertmachine-learningbenchmarkmeasuringbenchmarks
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