Kevin Z. | Leland

Kevin Z.

Machine Learning Engineer

Studied at Cornell College

Works at Rokt

Not currently taking new clients

Protected by the Leland Experience Guarantee

Not currently taking new clients

Kevin’s Artificial Intelligence Qualifications

Experience level: Associate

Seasoned machine learning engineer with 5+ years of Machine Learning experience in Big Tech across Amazon and Meta as well as pre-IPO unicorns. I have experience across a wide variety of problems from ranking in Alexa, spam detection at Facebook, and predicting ad relevancy at my current role. My work includes both on the MLOps side across experimentation, productionalizing and scaling a model, supporting a/b experimentation and model launches, as well as work in modeling itself across designing Multi-Task Learning Neural Networks and utilizing state of the art LLMs to generate features.

Kevin can help with:

Natural Language Processing

Technical Interview Prep

Machine Learning

View all of Kevin’s categories

About Kevin

Hi there! My name is Kevin and I'm here to share my extensive knowledge of working as a software engineer and navigating the tech industry from the largest FAANG companies to startups. Unlike most, I hated programming in college and never imagined getting into it. I studied Electrical Engineering and it wasn't until my senior year of undergrad that I took a datastructures course which would convince me to give software development a try. My career started as a full-stack web engineer and I quickly learned that web and front end wasn't for me. I went back to get a Masters in Computer Science to gather more of the fundamentals. Since then, I've worked at some of the biggest named tech companies as well as startups, starting as mostly backend and infra and transitioning to machine learning. I'd love to chat about backend engineering or machine learning alike!

Why do I coach?

When I first got out of grad school, I failed probably a hundred interviews because I didn't know how to prepare. I lucked my way into a company, where I then had no idea how to pick projects or how to push my career up. I would try to switch companies here and there but I would fail and it would just discourage me. Even switching teams was tough because I'd fail the internal interview. I felt trapped. Since then, I hunkered down and really mastered the interview process. I received offers from the rest of the top tech companies and have since given back by giving talks and mentoring several candidates through the interview process. I've also mentored others to navigate their career in order to get promoted or have mobility to move around. Lastly, I've helped others navigate the process of switching from backend to a more machine learning role.