Chen Yao Email & Phone Number

California, United States

Seattle, WA, US

• Lead and manage a team of engineers and tech leads across data, machine learning, and infrastructure, fostering a cross-functional and collaborative environment.
• Successfully shipped scalable ads conversion products with deep learning and large language models (LLM), enhancing customers’ shopping experience and engagement.
• Drive the execution of the team, balancing velocity and quality, while aiding in the growth and development of team members.
• Collaborate with key stakeholders, including Data Science, Product, and Business, ensuring alignment with organizational goals.

San Francisco, California, US

• Lead Billing Machine Learning and Consumer Love teams to drive efficiency across the Affirm ecosystem.
• Build robust and extensible Machine Learning solutions to enable new use cases, improving repayment rate and consumer experiences.

San Francisco, California, US

• Build Recommendations Team from ground up and own Recommendations Engine end-to-end.
• Ship Recommendations products from zero to one to make checking out multiple items frictionless through Fast checkout.

• Project Highlight 1: Shopping and Shopping Ads Recommendation and Experience Optimization
• Initiated the shopping experiences workstream to build the most relevant product recommendation and satisfied purchase.
• The product significantly lifted on shopping experiences and revenue.Project Highlight 2: Integrity Ads Delivery Enforcement
• Initiated and led cross-functional teams across Feed, Ads, and Integrity organizations to 1) Build machine learning infra and algorithms, and 2) Remove and downrank suspicious ads that may lead to harmful ads.
• Reduced bad ads delivery by over 90% on Facebook and mitigated Public Relationship and financial risk for Facebook ads around U.S. Election and worldwide.Project Highlight 3: Ads In-feed Experience Optimization
• Established In-feed Experience pillar and developed the prototype to launch first ever machine learning model powered bid to add crowdsource ads rating signals in ads ranking to deliver more relevant ads.

Madison, WI, US

• One of pioneers who introduced machine learning to animal genomics to predict future feed efficiency of dairy cattle.
• Built self-training model (one of semi-supervised learning strategies), a novel method combining phenotyped and non-phenotyped individuals, which increased the prediction accuracy up to 3%.
• Developed tree-based algorithms to identify new complex additive and epistatic relationship among genomic markers.

• Team: Feed Ads Quality. Project Highlight: Story Height Based Ads Gap
• Designed and implemented story height (pixel) based ads gap rule algorithm as part of Facebook ads auction system.
• Provided more consistent user experience of ad load within Facebook News Feed.

Washington, DC, US

• Designed and initiated U.S. national genetic evaluation system of stillbirth in U.S. Brown Swiss and Jersey cattle using machine learning and statistical algorithms.
• Introduced new trait (feed efficiency) to improve U.S. national dairy cattle genomic evaluation system based on research outcome ($5 million project).
• Contributed to Expended U.S. dairy cattle selection index to include feed efficiency, which will increase U.S. dairy genetic progress by about 4.5% per year.

Performed translation to Babcock Institute website update, lecture notes, and training materials; interpreted Babcock Institute international dairy short course at World Dairy Expo 2010 and 2011, workshops, and farm tours between English-speaking and Chinese professors, industry leaders, and farmers.

As one of Cowinfo founders, a national website aimed to benefit Chinese dairy farmers, led the team to translate English technical notes into Chinese, interpreted between English-speaking dairy experts and Chinese technical staff, and reported dairy events. Started “Youth Plan” to organize students to intern on farms and explore animal husbandry to clarify.

Worked on a dairy farm with 700 milking cows to practice all aspects of dairy farming.Visited universities, research labs, DHI centers, and veterinary centers to learn about Australian farming systems.

Doctor Of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Quantitative Genetics, Machine Learning

Master Of Science (Ms), Computer Science

Minor, Statistics

Master Of Science (Ms), Quantitative Genetics, Machine Learning

B.S., Animal Science