Sophie Z.

About Sophie Z.

Always happy to connect with people building real things.

Experience

1. Machine Learning Engineer (Tech Lead)

   Google

   Jun 2022 — Present · Mountain View, CA, US

   Took charge of YouTube Ads Creative Quality, influencing all YouTube surfaces (Shorts, Instream, and Indisplay) with a substantial impact on billions of impressions. Collaborate extensively with around 40 co-workers, spanning various roles such as product managers, data scientists, UX researchers, as well as infrastructure and machine learning engineers from cross-functional teams like Auction, AdsAI, Brand Safety, APAS, Google Brain, and DeepMind etc.* Provided strategic direction, defined quarterly objectives and key results (OKRs), and ensured seamless alignment across the entire reporting structure, encompassing VP-level stakeholders for high-level alignment and junior engineers for execution.* Elevated the performance of our inappropriateness model by developing domain-specific embeddings, leading the development of low-latency serving infrastructure, and fine-tuning vMMUM with algorithmically collected human evaluation labels for the first deployment of VLM within the YouTube Ads Organization. Resulted in a remarkable 80% decrease in inappropriate content, a 2.78% boost in LTR (Click-through Rate), a 3% improvement in CVR (Conversion Rate), an impressive 99% reduction in latency and recognition at the senior VP level.* Set up Northstar with a focus on elevating the premium quality of YouTube ads. This initiative involved pioneering the definition of \"Premiumness,\" integrating Attention signals, prototyping a proof of concept, designing fee functions within the Auction system, and effectively utilizing LLM for labeling, model training, and distillation. Constructed a comprehensive new infrastructure, spanning from feature extraction and training to serving.* Sequence modeling on user features.* Online and real-time user clustering for ads personalization.

Education

• Washington University in St. Louis

  Master of Science - MS, Mechanical Engineering (dropped)

• Qingdao University of Technology

  Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Building Environment and Energy Application Engineering

• Udacity

  Nanodegree, Self-Driving Car Engineer (Computer Vision and Deep Learning)

• Washington University in St. Louis

  Master of Science - MS, Computer Science

• Washington University in St. Louis

  Master of Science - MS, Electrical and Electronics Engineering