# Zheqing (Bill) Zhu

> Zheqing (Bill) Zhu is the founder and CEO of Pokee AI in Bellevue, Washington. A Stanford-trained reinforcement learning researcher, he previously led Meta AI’s Applied Reinforcement Learning team and the development and open-sourcing of Pearl. His work spans recommendation systems, production reinforcement learning and agents that plan, use tools and verify their work.

- **Role:** Founder & CEO at Pokee AI
- **Organizations:** Pokee AI, Meta AI
- **Education:** BS, Computer Science; minor in Finance; summa cum laude, Duke University, MS, Computer Science, Stanford University, PhD, Management Science and Engineering; reinforcement learning research, Stanford University
- **Known for:** Led development and open-sourcing of Pearl at Meta., Stanford doctoral research completed while working full time at Meta., Recipient of the CIE-SEA Asian American Science and Engineering Innovation Award.

## Career timeline

- **2017** — Graduated from Duke and joined Facebook as a machine learning engineer in Ads Growth.
- **2018–2021** — Engineering Manager / Tech Lead for Ads Growth Machine Learning at Facebook.
- **2020** — Earned an MS in Computer Science at Stanford while employed at Meta.
- **2021–2024** — Head of Applied Reinforcement Learning and Senior Staff Research Lead Manager at Meta AI.
- **2023** — Completed Stanford doctoral research and helped release Pearl in December.
- **2024** — Founded Pokee AI.
- **2025** — Pokee announced a $12 million seed round in July; Zhu coauthored the October PokeeResearch-7B paper.
- **2026** — Coauthored the August Pokee-Isaac technical report and September enterprise agent security whitepaper.

## Achievements

- Led development and open-sourcing of Pearl at Meta.
- Stanford doctoral research completed while working full time at Meta.
- Recipient of the CIE-SEA Asian American Science and Engineering Innovation Award.
- Duke Alex Vasilos Memorial Award and graduation with highest distinction.
- Led Pokee AI through a $12 million seed financing announced in July 2025.

## Latest updates

- **2026-05** — Featured in a CB Insights finalist interview discussing private enterprise deployment.
- **2026-08** — Coauthored the Pokee-Isaac 28B technical report dated August 3, 2026.
- **2026-09** — Coauthored Enterprise Agent and Model Security, a Pokee AI whitepaper.

## Links

- Website: https://www.zheqingbillzhu.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zheqingzhubill/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/ZheqingZhu
- GitHub: https://github.com/BillMatrix

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/zheqing-bill-zhu
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-11