About

Lei Chen is a highly experienced Staff Software Engineer with over 13 years of experience in machine learning, large-scale analytics, and web/vertical search indexing and serving. Currently working at Meta, Lei is the TL of the search ML platform team, where he is responsible for driving the deliverables in deep learning retrieval and ranking areas. He is also the tech lead for Instagram reels deep retrieval, where he has delivered significant business impact to the product. Lei leads a 20+ engs virtual team on critical modeling+infra theme, response for roadmap and daily execution, and also leads a 10+ engs team to improve consumer relevance through retrieval modeling, among other responsibilities. Prior to his current role, Lei worked as a Staff Software Engineer at Lyft, where he proposed, designed, and implemented a new real-time OLAP solution (BigQuery backed) that was widely adopted by the company. He also designed and implemented a multi-agent reinforcement learning system to simulate the marketplace and a near-real-time pipeline to transfer ad-hoc or event-driven online schematized data to offline SQL table. Before Lyft, Lei worked as a Software Engineer at Google, where he worked on BigQuery storage, focusing on partition table and materialized view. Lei holds a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from Wuhan University, where he studied from 2005 to 2009. He also attended Dongtai High School from 2002 to 2005. Lei's tech stack includes software engineering, senior software engineering, machine learning, search, deep learning, SQL, reinforcement learning, web, and infra. With 14.05 years of relevant experience, Lei is a highly skilled and accomplished software engineer with a proven track record of delivering significant business impact to the products he works on.