Senior ML Engineer · Researcher · Explorer

Hi, I'm Weijin (Zoey) Zou

I build AI systems that power how advertisers reach the right people across LinkedIn's 1.3 billion members. Off the clock, I'm on stage acting, in the mountains skiing, at the piano, or crafting something tiny and beautiful.

ML / LLMs Published Researcher Actress & Producer Nail Artist English Tutor Skier & Pianist Gemini ♊
Zoey Zou
♊ Gemini
01

About Me

I'm a Senior ML Engineer at LinkedIn HQ in Sunnyvale, where I build the AI systems behind how advertisers reach the right audiences. My work spans large-scale recommendation models, LLM-powered audience intelligence, and retrieval systems that serve hundreds of millions of members — turning complex ML research into products that move real business metrics.

Before LinkedIn, I earned my MS in Data Science from Yale University. At Yale's LILY Lab, I published papers at top NLP venues (EMNLP, NAACL) on LLM agents, question answering, and data-to-text generation.

A Gemini through and through — one half builds ML systems, the other half performs on stage. At Feiyu Theater I act, produce, and do makeup & costumes. I also teach English to 10k followers on Douyin, craft press-on nails, chase powder days on the slopes, and play piano when things get too quiet. I believe the best engineers are the ones who never stop being curious about everything outside of engineering.

02

Experience

2023–Now
Senior ML Engineer
LinkedIn · Ads AI

Led multi-task EBR for audience targeting across 1.3B+ members. Built Transformer-based sequence modeling (5% AUC lift, 15% CPC reduction). Shipped bid-aware matching, LLM cold-start targeting, and DMA compliance.

Production ML at Scale
2022
ML Engineer Intern
LinkedIn · Foundation AI

Upgraded LinkedIn related search backbone from LSTM to BART, achieving 15% accuracy improvement. Transformed corporate data into LLM prompts at scale.

NLP / Search
2021–23
Research Assistant
Yale LILY Lab

Published papers at EMNLP & NAACL on LLM agents, RAG, table QA, code generation, and data-to-text. Enhanced faithfulness and reliability of tool-augmented LLMs.

Published Researcher
2021
Research Engineer Intern
Baidu · PaddlePaddle

Built hybrid GCN+GAT for cancer drug response prediction (85% AUC). Contributed 1k+ lines to PaddlePaddle (17k stars), the 3rd largest DL framework.

Deep Learning / BioML
2020–21
NLP Research Engineer
BBD · FinTech AI

Built entity extraction (BiLSTM+CRF, 97% accuracy) for financial knowledge graphs. Topic clustering and stance analysis on social media at scale.

NLP / FinTech
Ongoing
Actress · Stage Producer · Makeup & Costume
Feiyu Theater

Performing on stage, producing shows end-to-end, and designing makeup & costumes. Theater is where analytical thinking meets creative expression.

Drama / Performing Arts
I believe the best ML systems are built by people who understand both the math and the humans on the other side of the model. — zoey, probably between a ski run and a rehearsal
03

What I Work With

01
ML / AI Systems

Multi-task learning, Embedding-Based Retrieval, recommendation systems, distributed training (TensorFlow, PyTorch), Transformers, LLMs & prompt engineering.

02
NLP & LLMs

RAG, tool-augmented agents, question answering, code generation, data-to-text, summarization. GPT prompt design, fine-tuning, evaluation frameworks.

03
Data Infrastructure

Apache Spark, Hadoop, Airflow, Kubernetes, key-value stores, Avro, data pipeline orchestration at LinkedIn scale. Python, Scala, Java, C++, SQL.

04
Ads & Audience AI

Audience targeting, bid-aware ranking, cold-start solutions, objective-aware scoring, privacy compliance (EU DMA), production ML serving 1.3B+ members.

05
Research & Publication

papers at EMNLP & NAACL. Research on LLM reliability, faithfulness evaluation, augmented generation. Yale LILY Lab, Yale School of Medicine.

06
Web & Full Stack

React, Next.js, Flask. Building internal tools, dashboards, and data visualization interfaces. From prototype to production.

04

Publications

EMNLP 2024
OMG-QA: Building Open-Domain Multi-Modal Generative Question Answering Systems
NAACL 2024
On Evaluating the Integration of Reasoning and Action in LLM Agents with Database Question Answering
EMNLP 2023
Enhancing Few-shot Text-to-SQL Capabilities of Large Language Models: A Study on Prompt Design Strategies
EMNLP 2023
QTSumm: Query-Focused Summarization over Tabular Data
EMNLP 2022
R2D2: Robust Data-to-Text with Replacement Detection
05

Beyond the Terminal

🎭
Drama
Feiyu Theater — actress, stage producer, makeup & costume. Where analytical meets creative.
feiyutheater.org →
🚀
Coding
Building an app — launching soon. Follow me on LinkedIn for the announcement!
Coming Soon github.com/VIcKII-Z →
Crafting
Handmade press-on nail designs and jewelry. Tiny things made with care — precision meets art.
@zoeynailsdesign on Instagram →
🌍
Exploring
New places, new people, new ideas. 7,836 likes & saves on Xiaohongshu — come explore with me!
Visit my Xiaohongshu →
📖
English Tutor
10k+ followers on Douyin. Teaching English with real-world context — from Yale to Silicon Valley.
Follow me on Douyin →
🎹
Piano
Keys and melodies. Music is the closest thing to pure pattern recognition.
⛷️
Skiing
Chasing powder days in Tahoe and beyond. The mountain is the best debugger.
🎲
Board Games
Strategy, bluffing, negotiation. It's basically distributed systems with snacks.

Let's Chat

Based in Sunnyvale, CA. Open to collaborations, coffee chats, and interesting conversations.
Drop me a message right here — it goes straight to my inbox.

Or find me on LinkedIn