Li Fan (engineer)


Li Fan is a computer scientist and the Head of Engineering at Lime. She has previously held positions at Pinterest, Google and Baidu. She is an expert on visual computation.

Early life

Fan was interested in painting as a child but was encouraged to focused on academia. She studied computer science at Fudan University. She earned her bachelor's degree in 1996, when she moved to University of Wisconsin–Madison for her graduate studies. Here she developed techniques for scalable web caching. She studied the potential of web prefetching between low-bandwidth clients and proxies.

Career

Fan joined Cisco Systems as a software engineer. She joined Google in 2002. At Google she worked at google+, managing the infrastructure of ad spam and page ranking. In 2012 she was appointed Vice President of engineering at Baidu. At Baidu, Fan launched the cross-function data processing group. Fan was responsible for product design at China's largest search engine and led 1,000 people. She worked on big data analytics. In 2014 she returned to Google and became Head of Image Search.
In 2016 Fan joined Pinterest as Head of Engineering. She built an artificial intelligence team to work on visual machine perception. She led a team of 400 engineers and developed their discovery engine.
Fan joined the scooter company LimeBike in 2018. She was named as one of the most important engineers in the world by Business Insider and one of the most creative people by Fast Company.

Award