Mike Lawrence

Senior Machine Learning Engineer @ Google

Palo Alto, California, United States

About

Research-oriented ML engineer specializing in large-scale sequence modeling, retrieval systems, and evaluation design. I've spent the last few years finding the gaps between how models train and how they actually behave in production, while building the research directions to close them. Motivated by AI systems that are both capable and reliably aligned with intended behavior. https://www.mlawrence.info

Experience

  • Google (Full-time · 4 yrs 7 mos)
    • Senior Software Engineer, Machine Learning
      Apr 2024 - Present · 2 yrs 3 mos

      YouTube Shorts, Recommendations TL for flagship retrieval model. Responsible for end-to-end model quality, including model architecture, data, and training/serving infrastructure. * Led long-term initiatives for retrieval model quality improvement, leading to substantial improvement in YouTube Shorts engagement. * Worked horizontally to improve modeling and infra for other models in YouTube Shorts, finding many training/serving improvements for other key models in the ecosystem * Mentored many other machine learning engineers

    • Software Engineer, Machine Learning
      Dec 2021 - Apr 2024 · 2 yrs 5 mos

      AutoML/Vertex AI MLE on model platform team. Converted numerous in-house models into new Cloud products as part of a research partnership. Involved in deep learning for tabular data, time series forecasting, and eventually large multimodal models.

  • Data Scientist at Illumina
    May 2021 - Dec 2021 · 8 mos

    Machine learning engineer on biotech demand forecasting platform.

  • Invoca (Full-time · 2 yrs 5 mos)
    • Senior Data Scientist
      Mar 2021 - May 2021 · 3 mos

      - Invented novel statistical method for identifying hold messages and scripted language [Patent pending] - Created safety tooling to check thousands of live machine learning models before a deploy - Automated model health checks for product managers with a PDF of performance metrics - Led a team of talented undergrad data scientists for UCSB’s data science capstone initiative

    • Data Scientist
      Mar 2020 - May 2021 · 1 yr 3 mos

    • Associate Data Scientist
      Jan 2019 - Mar 2020 · 1 yr 3 mos

  • University of California, Berkeley (7 mos)
    • Data Science TA
      Aug 2018 - Dec 2018 · 5 mos

    • Emilio Segrè Intern (Physics Lab TA + Curriculum Developer)
      Jun 2018 - Aug 2018 · 3 mos

  • Private Tutor at Self-Employed
    Aug 2015 - Dec 2018 · 3 yrs 5 mos

    Tutoring for math, physics, and chemistry from high school to university-level coursework.