# Eugene Yan

> Eugene Yan is a Principal Applied Scientist turned Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, where he bridges cutting-edge AI research with production-scale systems. Formerly at Amazon for five years building real-time recommendation and LLM-powered systems for Kindle and Search, Eugene is equally well-known for his prolific writing: 209 blog posts, 420,000+ words published, and a newsletter with over 11,800 subscribers. His open-source repository applied-ml on GitHub has become a canonical reference for teams shipping machine learning in production. He lives in Seattle, snowboards on weekends, and writes like someone who actually wants you to understand.

- **Role:** Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic
- **Organizations:** Anthropic, Amazon, Lazada / Alibaba, IBM
- **From:** Singapore
- **Nationality:** Singaporean
- **Education:** Bachelor's Degree in Psychology and Organizational Behavior, Singapore Management University, Master's Degree in Computer Science (Online), Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech)
- **Known for:** 209 blog posts published on eugeneyan.com totaling 420,000+ words, Newsletter with 11,800+ subscribers running for 6+ years, 25,600+ followers on X (Twitter)

## Career timeline

- **2013** — Started as Data Scientist at IBM, working on workforce analytics and fraud detection
- **2015** — Joined Lazada (later acquired by Alibaba) as Data Scientist; rose to VP of Machine Learning
- **2018** — Built Southeast Asia's strongest data science team at Lazada/Alibaba; oversaw product ranking improvements of 5-20%
- **2018** — Moved to a Series A healthtech startup as ML Lead; built disease detection and cost estimation models for Southeast Asia's largest healthcare provider
- **2020** — Joined Amazon as Applied Scientist, working in Search and Books on real-time retrieval, bandit rankers, and recommendation systems
- **2022** — Delivered keynote at RecSys 2022: 'Is the juice worth the squeeze, for real-time recommendations?'
- **2023** — Promoted to Principal Applied Scientist at Amazon; keynoted AIE Summit 2023
- **2024** — Co-authored 'What We've Learned From A Year of Building with LLMs'; keynoted AIE World's Fair 2024
- **2025** — Joined Anthropic as Member of Technical Staff, focusing on recommendation systems and safe AI at scale

## Achievements

- 209 blog posts published on eugeneyan.com totaling 420,000+ words
- Newsletter with 11,800+ subscribers running for 6+ years
- 25,600+ followers on X (Twitter)
- Open-source repository 'applied-ml' on GitHub - canonical reference for ML in production
- Co-created applied-llms.org - practical guide to building with LLMs
- 31 keynotes and talks at major conferences including RecSys, AIE World's Fair
- 19 open-source prototypes published
- Led product ranking improvements of 5-20% at Lazada/Alibaba
- Built real-time recommendation infrastructure at Amazon serving Kindle and Search
- Featured by Amazon Science for writing about ML systems
- Built Southeast Asia's largest healthtech ML prediction systems

## Latest updates

- **2025-01** — Joined Anthropic as Member of Technical Staff after 5 years at Amazon
- **2025-05** — Wrote about automating agentic workflows with Amazon Q CLI, Anthropic MCP, and tmux
- **2025-12** — Published 2025 Year in Review; focus areas include RecSys x LLMs, semantic IDs, long-context Q&A, and agents
- **2026-04** — Working at Anthropic on recommendation systems and safe, reliable AI at scale

## Links

- Website: https://eugeneyan.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eugeneyan
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/eugeneyan
- GitHub: https://github.com/eugeneyan
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@eugeneyanYT

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/eugene-yan
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-04-21