Hi, I'm Michael. My Chinese name is Zhucheng Tu (涂竹成). I'm a Research Engineer working on developing the foundation model for personalized recommendation at Netflix since August 2024, serving 300M+ subscribers, where I am the lead IC for the PyTorch-based foundation model. Prior to that I was a Machine Learning Engineer in the AI/ML org at Apple from January 2019 - August 2024. For most of my time there (July 2020 - August 2024) I was a core engineer on open-domain question answering and search (O(100M) unique monthly devices). Since April 2022 I also had close collaborations with the Apple Foundation Models team, including executing the bulk of the technical engineering work (modeling + infra) to productionize one of the first models trained using the foundation model codebase, for web ranking. From January 2019 - June 2020 I had the opportunity to rotate on different teams including Visual Intelligence, AI Research, Machine Translation, Web Question Answering, Knowledge Graph Question Answering, and Differential Privacy.

I graduated as a thesis-based Master's student from the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in 2018, specializing at the intersection of natural language processing and information retrieval. During my Master's my focus was on semantic textual similarity and retrieval-based question answering. I was advised by Professor Jimmy Lin. I also completed my undergraduate studies at the University of Waterloo majoring in Software Engineering, graduating on the Dean's Honour's List in June 2017. During my undergrad I interned at large tech companies (Meta, Uber) as well as a Series B e-commerce start-up that powered the recommedation system of Uniqlo, Disney, etc. at the time.

I enjoy building things end-to-end, doing whatever is needed to get the job done, whether it is modeling, infrastructure, data, or anything in-between. I can wear multiple hats. Much of the work to build a successful product is not glamorous, after all.

My overarching goals have remained the same for many years: to be an earnest person whom can be relied upon and to never stop learning. I am interested in photography, reading, travelling, skiing / snowboarding, history, and astronomy.