Eugene Yan
Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon
Seattle, Washington
Overview
Work Experience
Principal Applied Scientist
2025 - Current
• Building recommender systems and AI-powered experiences to serve customers at scale. • Advising leadership and teams on how to solve the right problem with the simplest solution. • Educating organizations across Amazon on RecSys, AI, Evals, Agents, and more.
Senior Applied Scientist
2022 - 2025
• Designed and shipped centralized LLM systems for new GenAI customer experiences: - Built and deployed guardrails (e.g., content-safety, factual inconsistency) for customer-facing apps. - Built retrieval, clustering, and caching systems, improving output & reducing cost by 80%. - Built finetuning pipeline for task-specific LLMs (e.g., summarization) to address legal/privacy concerns, eliminate dependency of 3rd-party APIs, improve performance, and reduce costs by 90%. - Led the use of LLMs to accelerate and nearly complete a three-year roadmap within a year. • Shipping ML & recommender systems to help customers discover, buy, and read more books: - Built bandit ranker to explore-exploit with sparse feedback; increased CTR XX% and profit $Y mil. - Designed labeling queues to collect ground-truth via strategies for precision, recall, coverage. • Educating & advising organizational leadership and teams as part of Generative AI Working Group.
Applied Scientist
2020 - 2022
• Built real-time candidate retrieval for recommendations and search; increased units and revenue by XX million, improved search metrics by Y%, 8,000+ queries/sec, p99 latency < 25ms, low cost (<2k monthly). • Prototyped interactive tag-based discovery for books; launched on Amazon detail page and Kindle app. • Incremental RecSys improvements: Added serendipity & book length preferences; +XX million in revenue.
Amazon is a tech firm with a focus on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence.
Raised $8,108,000,000.00 from DBS Bank and Mizuho Bank.
Builder
2021
• Iterating on AI systems, amplifying teams: https://www.aiteratelabs.com • AlignEval: Making evals easy, fun, and semi-automated: http://aligneval.com • How to build successful LLM products: https://applied-llms.org • Papers, guides, and interviews with ML practitioners: https://applyingml.com
Machine Learning Lead
2018 - 2019
uCare.ai aims to make healthcare more efficient and reduce cost. Winner of Frost & Sullivan's 2019 Innovation Award and accredited by the Singapore government. Predicted chronic diseases with 80% recall & 50% precision. Wanted to work with insurers to improve insurees’ health & reduce claims; they wanted us to identify who was healthy to sell them more insurance. Shipped hospital bill prediction system for Southeast Asia’s largest healthcare provider; 60% model improvement over prior system,24/7 uptime, 99% SLA, sub-second latency (http://bit.ly/ucarexparkway). Also: pitching, hiring, ML strategy, community engagement, internal tooling (shortened dev cycle by 60%)
VP, Machine Learning
2017 - 2018
Lazada is Southeast Asia's largest e-commerce platform; acquired by Alibaba in April 2016. - Facilitated organizational & technological merger between Lazada and Alibaba. Built & led a team of 20+. Engaged execs on data & ML roadmap. Systems we shipped include: - Search and RecSys improvements: Increased CTR and conversion by ~30% - Push notifications: Increased open-rate and add-to-cart by 10%, reduced opt-out rate, increased DAU - Delivery forecasting: Migrated from R to Python and shortened model refresh cycle by 5x - Internal newsletter: Increased business’ understanding of ML, spurring more collaboration on projects
Senior Data Scientist
2015 - 2017
Built scalable ML systems across 6 countries, improving business outcomes and user experience, including: - Product ranking: Increased conversion by 5-8% and revenue by 15 - 20% - Product classifier: 95% top-3 accuracy, 200+ queries/second, reduced manual effort >95%, cost by >50% - Search intent API: Increased search CTR by 3-5%, 400+ queries/second - Review classifier: >95% precision, >85% recall, reduced manual effort and cost by >90%
Data Scientist
2014 - 2015
Job demand forecasting & internal job RecSys; reduced attrition, reduced compute time by 90%.
Data Analyst
2013 - 2014
Social media analytics for global brand, anti-money laundering for global bank, supply chain for IBM.
IBM is an IT technology and consulting firm providing computer hardware, software, infrastructure, and hosting services.
Trade and Investment Analyst
2011 - 2013
Negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Singapore-Taiwan FTA, and Singapore-India FTA review.
Research Assistant
2008 - 2011
Contributed to 2 academic papers and several conference presentations.
Entrepreneur-Intern
2009 - 2009
Set up 1-Caramel (a patisserie and café); broke even within 6 months.