Bo Zhao

Bo Zhao is currently the Director of Engineering at Pinterest, a position he has held since May 2023. His career at Pinterest began in 2016, where he progressed through various roles, including Senior Engineering Manager and Staff ML Engineer focused on personalization and shopping content. His work primarily revolves around enhancing user understanding and developing personalization platforms for both ads and organic content recommendations.1

Educational Background

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from Fudan University (2003 - 2007)
• Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2007 - 2012), specializing in machine learning, data mining, and databases. His doctoral research was supervised by Jiawei Han.1

Professional Experience

• Pinterest:

  • Director of Engineering (May 2023 - Present)
  • Senior Engineering Manager - Personalization, Shopping Content (Aug 2020 - May 2023)
  • Engineering Manager / Staff ML Engineer, Personalization (Jan 2018 - Jul 2020)
  • Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Tech Lead (Jun 2016 - Dec 2017)

• LinkedIn:

  • Senior Software Engineer (Dec 2014 - May 2016), working on job recommendation systems and economic graph projects.

• Microsoft:

  • Researcher / Senior Engineer (Oct 2012 - Oct 2014), focusing on entity matching frameworks and contextual entity exploration.

• Google:

  • Held multiple engineering intern positions from 2006 to 2010.12

Contributions to the Field

Bo Zhao has made significant contributions to machine learning, evidenced by over 30 published papers in top conferences such as NIPS, KDD, and SIGMOD, accumulating more than 3000 citations. He is recognized for his strong technical skills combined with a solid understanding of product and business needs, which enhances his impact in engineering leadership roles.3