Available for advising & senior leadership opportunities

Milan Shah
building AI at scale.

Senior Engineering Manager · Head of Personalization & Applied AI at Amazon.

+1-646-647-4178 mshahsmv@gmail.com linkedin.com/in/milan-shah-lin NYC
$12B+
Attributed ARR, 2025 (+120% YoY)
75+
Engineers & scientists led
500M+
Customers served globally
500K
RPS · 45B daily transactions
01

About

Innovative engineering executive with 16+ years of experience, currently leading Amazon's Intent Personalization org of 75+ engineers and applied scientists. My teams deliver real-time large-scale personalized recommendations and systems that power Search, Homepage, Cart, and Detail Page experiences for 500M+ customers globally — driving high-impact engagement, contributing $12B+ in ARR in 2025, and accelerating Amazon's topline growth.

I define and drive the multi-year technical vision for customer understanding and personalized recommendation engines at scale, leveraging ANN-based retrieval, transformer-based rankers, and NLP to deliver nuanced product and intent understanding. My influence extends across 150+ engineers, scientists, and stakeholders in Search, Ads, and Home.

I excel at building high-performance AI organizations that combine cutting-edge innovation with operational excellence — mentoring engineers and managers, and fostering collaborative environments where transformative AI solutions can flourish.

02

Experience

Senior Engineering Manager · Amazon 05/2021 – Present · NYC
  • Lead a 75+ person Personalization Intent organization (engineering and applied science), setting strategy and delivering AI-powered shopping experiences across Amazon.
  • Define the multi-year vision and roadmap for Amazon's recommendation and customer intent platforms, contributing over $12B in annual attributed revenue (2025, +120% YoY).
  • Lead a high-performing organization of Principal Engineers, Applied Scientists, and Engineering Managers — driving technical strategy, organizational scaling, and operational excellence.
  • Own Amazon's real-time customer intent platform (500K RPS / 45B daily transactions) powering personalization across Search, Homepage, Cart, and Detail Pages.
  • Lead strategy and adoption of an AI agent platform enabling autonomous engineering workflows through persistent memory, multi-agent orchestration, and secure integrations across Slack, Quip, Microsoft 365, and AWS — scaled across Personalization and expanded for multi-org use.
  • Led development of LLM-generated customer profiles fusing deep-learning behavioral signals with semantic understanding to power last-mile ranking.
  • Lead Amazon's next-generation AI recommendation platform, leveraging customer intent, embeddings, retrieval, and GenAI for explainable shopping guidance.
  • Built an NLP/LLM-powered product intelligence platform standardizing product understanding and catalog attributes, enabling Search, Rufus, and p13n at scale.
  • Established a new strategic org developing ML models and distributed infrastructure for Amazon's prompt-based conversational shopping experiences.
  • Drive multi-year investment planning and cross-org execution across Search, Home, Ads, and Personalization.
Engineering Manager · Valtech (formerly Kin + Carta) 02/2019 – 03/2021 · NYC
  • Transitioned from Principal Engineer to Engineering Manager in Q1 2020.
  • Led 15 global engineers; led the implementation of a recommender engine using Google Vertex AI and custom embeddings.
  • Built a multi-tenant real-time content personalization engine with multi-language and A/B testing infrastructure.
  • Built event-driven microservices; orchestrated Kubernetes clusters for HA and failover, cutting downtime by 40%.
  • Implemented gRPC-based microservices for low-latency communication, reducing request processing time by 50%.
Principal Software Engineer · JPMorgan Chase & Co. 12/2017 – 01/2019 · NYC
  • Developed distributed pricing engines, a personetics engine, deposit engine, and real-time alerts for the Digital Wealth team.
Senior Software Engineer · Lightspeed Systems 04/2015 – 12/2017 · NYC
  • Led backend development of an AI-powered student web filtering system, serving over 10M students globally.
  • Introduced real-time content classification using NLP and ensemble-based URL scoring, cutting review delays by 70%.
CTO · Propagate 01/2012 – 02/2015 · NYC
Co-Founder & CTO · Olter Inc 01/2010 – 01/2012 · NYC
03

Technical Skills

Languages

PythonTypeScript

ML / AI

TensorFlowPyTorchDeep LearningXGBoostSageMakerBedrockTransformersRLCUDA

Infrastructure

AWSKafkaSparkFlinkOpenSearchCDKTerraformDockerKubernetes

Databases

DynamoDBCassandraPostgreSQL/SQLOpenSearchPinecone

Leadership

Org designStrategic planningOKRsHiring & performance managementP&L
04

Notable Projects

Cross-Amazon Personalization Guild

Co-founded an internal guild that created shared libraries, best practices, and hiring rubrics across Amazon AI teams.

Real-Time Behavioral Personalization Layer

Built a near-real-time streaming pipeline (Kinesis + Flink + DynamoDB) that enabled session-aware ranking across Amazon.

Go deeper →

The systems, architecture, and technical decisions behind my work — written up in detail.

Read more!
05

Education

🎓 B.S. in Computer Science · Rutgers University