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David Kolb

@davidkolb

Senior AI Engineer at Upstart building large-scale LLM ranking and recommendation systems with real-time inference.

At Upstart, I lead development of large-scale machine learning, deep learning, and LLM-based ranking and recommendation systems. I architect end-to-end ML pipelines and build transformer models for ranking, classification, and sequence prediction.

I design retrieval-augmented generation systems using vector databases, semantic search, and embeddings. I also optimize real-time inference and develop A/B testing frameworks for recommendation and ranking algorithms.

At Pinecone, I developed ranking and recommendation models for large-scale personalization systems. I built scalable pipelines for distributed data processing and model training, and contributed to experimentation frameworks and low-latency production inference.

At Alteryx, I led enterprise data science initiatives involving predictive modeling, forecasting, and customer analytics. I unified data ingestion, feature engineering, training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring in an automated ML pipeline, and guided junior data scientists and analysts.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior AI Engineer

Current

Upstart

May 2025 - Present (1 year 6 months)

Lead development of large-scale ML, deep learning, and LLM-based ranking and recommendation systems. Architect end-to-end ML pipelines and optimize real-time inference.

Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Pinecone

Mar 2020 - May 2025 (5 years 2 months)

Developed and optimized machine learning ranking and recommendation models for large-scale personalization systems. Built scalable ML pipelines and implemented deep learning models for user engagement prediction.

Machine Learning Deep Learning Ranking Systems Recommendation Systems Personalization Distributed Data Processing Model Training Feature Stores A B Testing Experimentation Low Latency Inference Serving Embedding Based Retrieval Data Drift Model Monitoring

Machine Learning Engineer

Pinecone

Feb 2014 - Mar 2015 (1 year 1 month)

Built and improved machine learning models for ranking, personalization, and content recommendation. Developed training data pipelines and worked on classification and regression models.

Machine Learning Ranking Systems Personalization Recommendation Systems Classification regression Data Pipelines A B Testing Model Deployment Inference Stability Data Quality Leakage Training Serving Skew Detection

Data Scientist

Alteryx

Dec 2012 - Feb 2014 (1 year 2 months)

Led enterprise data science initiatives involving predictive modeling, machine learning, forecasting, and customer analytics. Designed classification, regression, and clustering models for churn prediction and customer segmentation.

predictive modeling Machine Learning Forecasting Customer Analytics Classification regression Clustering Churn Prediction Customer Segmentation Demand Forecasting Data Pipelines Feature Engineering Model Evaluation Cross Validation Statistical Modeling Hypothesis Testing Model Interpretability SQL Python

Data Analyst

Alteryx

Jun 2011 - Dec 2012 (1 year 6 months)

Contributed to customer analytics and segmentation models for strategic decision making. Supported data collection, cleaning, and validation across structured enterprise datasets.