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Chris Wang

@chriswang1

Senior Applied AI Engineer building RAG and agentic systems for search and retrieval, improving quality, evals, and production reliability.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m looking for a team where I can ship applied ML for search and agentic systems—owning end-to-end quality (retrieval + evals), production reliability, and fast iteration with strong observability.

I’m a Senior Applied AI Engineer specializing in applied ML for search, retrieval, and agentic systems. At Perplexity, I build LLM-based query understanding for the core answer engine and Deep Research, shipping intent classification, query rewriting, and agentic task decomposition.

I develop production-grade RAG pipelines for grounding in internal and web content, and I improve retrieval quality with hybrid lexical-semantic ranking, cross-encoder rerankers, chunking, and context selection. I also own the end-to-end ML lifecycle for personalization and memory features, from data prep and supervised fine-tuning to offline evals, online A/B tests, and rollout gates.

Previously at Fireflies.ai and Airbnb, I combined applied GenAI with strong full-stack engineering. I’ve productionized multi-step, tool-using workflows (LangGraph/MCP, structured outputs) and shipped reliable services using Python, FastAPI, GraphQL, React/TypeScript, and robust observability in Docker/Kubernetes.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Applied AI Engineer

Current

Perplexity

Oct 2024 - Present (1 year 8 months)

Built LLM-based query understanding and intent classification for Perplexity’s core answer engine and Deep Research, shipping agentic decomposition and structured outputs. Developed RAG, hybrid retrieval with reranking, evaluation/rollout workflows, and production embedding and semantic retrieval services with robust observability and QA tooling.

Python PyTorch LlamaIndex Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)LangGraph MCP Agent Workflows fastAPI Cross Encoder Re Ranking

Senior Applied AI Engineer

Fireflies.ai

Sep 2022 - Oct 2024 (2 years 1 month)

Delivered transcript-grounded Q&A and prompt-based AI skills, integrating retrieval, routing, and tool-using workflows for meeting productivity. Built ranking/retrieval pipelines and evaluation and observability for GenAI services, then productionized systems with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD.

Python fastAPI GraphQL Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)LLM Evaluation Docker Kubernetes MLFlow Celery REST APIs

Full Stack Engineer

Airbnb

Nov 2018 - Aug 2022 (3 years 9 months)

Built backend services and internal support tooling to streamline host/guest workflows for policy and reservation issues. Developed schema-driven support console experiences and APIs for improved help-center ranking and response flows, supporting automation rollout with production reliability and evaluation hooks for AI-adjacent features.

Python Java GraphQL React TypeScript SQL CI CD Production Platform Reliability