Northwestern University

Peking University

VP of Engineering @ LinkedIn. Previously VP @ Twitter and head of Engineering @ Quora. Ex-Googler.

I'm currently leading a 500+ eng org at LinkedIn that's responsible for our core Consumer product, including Feed, Search, Messenger, Profile, Pages, Conversations, Content Discovery, Content Platform, Creator Ecosystem, Rich Media, Events, and Groups. My teams are distributed across SF bay area, New York, Bellevue, and Bangalore. Our mission is to keep pushing for technological and product innovations to deliever member value and create economic opportunities for the global workforce.

LinkedIn

VP of Engineering

fellows.fund

Distinguished Fellow

I led a full-stack, distributed eng org at Twitter that's responsible for the core Twitter product experiences, including home timeline, search, explore, topics, recommendation, notifications, and new user onboarding. During my tenure in this role, my teams drove a major transformation at Twitter to build advanced AI and personalization systems to help every Twitter user discover and connect with people and content that are the most relevant to them, whether or not they are in their follow network.

Twitter

I started my journey at Quora to lead their ranking and content distribution team and was fortunate enough to grow with the company. In my last three year at Quora, I was their head of technology, leading all of Quora's engineering, AI, Data Science, as well as IT and Security, reporting to the CEO. During my tenure, we drove a number of major technological innovations, doubled the engineering team size, grew the user base by 3x, and built our advertising monetization product from 0 to 100.

[Oct 2015 - Nov 2016] Senior Manager, ranking and content distribution
[Nov 2016 - May 2017] Director of Engineering, Machine learning
[May 2017 - Sep 2020] VP of Engineering

Quora

VP, Head of Engineering

I started my career as a software engineer at Google, where I was able to contribute to a number of impactful products and challenging technical problems. I worked on combating abuse & spam at Ads, ranking & personalization at Google+, and recommendation systems at Google Now. Although these are different products and domains, one thing in common is their heavy focus on machine learning and AI, which became my passion ever since.

[Jul 2007 - Sep 2007] Summer Intern
[Sep 2008 - Sep 2012] Ads quality, spam, and abuse
[Sep 2012 - Sep 2015] Google+ and Google now personalization, ranking, recommendations

Google

Staff Software Engineer, Technical Lead and Manager

I was a research intern at NEC labs during summer 2004 and 2005, where I invented memory compression and CPU frequency scaling techniques to optimize for energy efficiency in embedded systems (the predecessor of modern mobile phones and tablets) without sacrificing performance. My invention was later productionized in NEC tablets and my research paper "HAPPE: Human and Application-Driven Frequency Scaling for Processor Power Efficiency" was published as the Spotlight Paper for the August 2013 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

Lei Yang