Ted Chai

About me

I currently work at Shopify, focusing on language-model post-training for Sidekick, its AI assistant for merchants. I work on fine-tuning, scalable training-data pipelines, evaluation, and large-scale inference. Recent work includes a tool-calling agent that turns natural-language requests into Shopify Flow automations, and scaling batch inference for large-scale language-model workloads.

Before Shopify, I built conversational search and recommendation systems at Crossing Minds. Earlier, I worked on ranking and personalization at Agoda, building machine-learning systems serving millions of users and data pipelines processing more than 600 million events a day.

I studied Applied Computing at the University of Toronto. Outside work, I snowboard, play Hearthstone, and walk my dog.

Writing and projects

All writing ↗

Experience

2024—now
ShopifySenior Machine Learning Engineer · Sidekick
2022—2024
Crossing MindsMachine Learning Engineer
2018—2021
AgodaMachine Learning Engineer

Education

2021—2022
University of TorontoMSc · Applied Computing
2014—2018
SIIT, Thammasat UniversityBEng · Computer Engineering