# Eddie Zhou

> Eddie Zhou is a founding engineer and AI team lead at Glean whose career has moved from a student-built firefighting information system to large-scale deep learning at Google Brain and enterprise search, assistants, and agents at Glean. His work is united by a practical question: how can a system retrieve the right context, for the right person, at the moment it matters?

- **Role:** Founding Engineer and AI Team Lead at Glean
- **Organizations:** Glean, Google Brain, FireStop, Princeton University
- **Education:** B.S.E. in Operations Research and Financial Engineering; certificate in Statistics and Machine Learning; magna cum laude, Princeton University
- **Known for:** Won Princeton's Center for Statistics and Machine Learning's first Independent Work Award in 2016., Completed a three-part undergraduate thesis covering temporal models for autonomous driving, nonparametric LSTMs, and an R package for Bayesian-optimized deep learning., Helped productionize deep-learning systems for Google products including Search, Assistant, YouTube, and Ads.

## Career timeline

- **2013** — Co-founded FireStop with Charlie Jacobson while at Princeton, building a cloud-connected iPad platform to put building plans, hydrant locations, hazard notices, and other response information in firefighters' hands.
- **2016** — Graduated from Princeton in Operations Research and Financial Engineering with a Statistics and Machine Learning certificate; his three-part senior thesis won the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning's first Independent Work Award.
- **After 2016** — Worked on Google's Applied Brain team, helping build and productionize large-scale deep-learning models used in Web Search ranking, Assistant language understanding, YouTube, and Ads recommendations.
- **2019** — Joined Glean's early team as a founding engineer; later public biographies describe him as leading Intelligence and serving as an AI team lead.
- **2021** — Co-authored Glean's explanation of why enterprise search lagged web search and what systems needed to close the gap.
- **2023** — Co-authored an early argument that fluent large-language-model output should not be confused with reliable knowledge, and discussed enterprise LLMs on NVIDIA's AI Podcast.
- **2025** — Explained Glean's reasoning-agent architecture, context injection, evaluation, and multi-agent delegation on Software Engineering Daily; co-authored work on Agentic Engine 2 and context engineering.
- **2026** — Co-authored Glean's launch article for Waldo, an agentic search model reported to cut search latency by about 50% and token use by about 25% when paired with frontier models.

## Achievements

- Won Princeton's Center for Statistics and Machine Learning's first Independent Work Award in 2016.
- Completed a three-part undergraduate thesis covering temporal models for autonomous driving, nonparametric LSTMs, and an R package for Bayesian-optimized deep learning.
- Helped productionize deep-learning systems for Google products including Search, Assistant, YouTube, and Ads.
- Joined Glean's early team as a founding engineer and became a public technical voice on enterprise search, assistants, and agents.
- Co-authored Glean engineering work reporting 94% completeness for Agentic Engine 2 and lower latency and token use for the Waldo agentic search model.

## Latest updates

- **2026-04** — Co-authored Glean's launch post for Waldo, an agentic search model that plans retrieval before a frontier model produces the final answer.
- **2025-12** — Co-authored Glean's argument that AI platforms should take on more of the burden of context engineering rather than leaving it to each application developer.
- **2025-09** — Appeared as an AI Native Summit speaker and was described as Glean's founding engineer and AI team lead; co-authored the Agentic Engine 2 performance article.
- **2025-04** — Joined Software Engineering Daily for a detailed discussion of reasoning agents, retrieval, identity, evaluation, and multi-agent design.

## Links

- Website: https://www.glean.com/authors/eddie-zhou
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eddie-zhou-70364b54
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/eddiedzhou
- GitHub: https://github.com/edz504

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/eddie-zhou
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-27