Portrait of Li Zheng

Li Zheng

Founder, Flatre.ai | AI Product & Data Leader | ex-Meta

Summary

Data science and AI product leader with 9+ years of experience shipping 0→1 products and scaling AI and data systems to global audiences. Expertise in experimentation, causal inference, LLM evaluation and integration, search, measurement, and product growth.

Experience

Founder

Flatre.aiOct 2025–Present

Building real estate AI for agents, teams, and brokerages—bringing pipeline, inbox, contracts, deadlines, communications, vendors, and approvals into one intelligent workspace.

  • Unifying deal workflows, documents, communications, tasks, and approvals around a shared transaction record.
  • Designing review-gated AI workflows that surface risk and keep agents in control.

Staff Data Scientist, Tech Lead

Meta (Instagram / Messenger)Sep 2021–Jan 2026

Led Instagram Search × Meta AI integration through LLM-based query understanding and personalized ranking; previously drove the global launch of end-to-end encryption on Messenger through experiment design, go-to-market strategy, and capacity planning.

  • 0→1: Set the launch bar and drove AI Search integration into Instagram.
  • 1→100: Rebuilt the search flow across query understanding, retrieval, ranking, personalization, and model evaluation, improving high-quality search volume by 21% year over year.
  • Designed LLM evaluation frameworks and benchmark suites for quality, safety, and regression, including human-in-the-loop annotation and system-prompt optimization.
More impact
  • Designed a predictive decision framework for peak demand and capacity cost that informed company-level investment decisions and unblocked Instagram AI Search launch.
  • Led a cross-functional analytics team improving Instagram Search quality and enabling Meta AI features such as summarization and content recognition.
  • Drove product go/no-go decisions through experiment design, goal and metric definition, rollout planning, and causal studies.
  • Designed custom A/B testing frameworks for cluster and network experiments that became standard practice across the organization.
  • Set team roadmaps by identifying user friction, sizing and prioritizing opportunities, estimating timelines from experiment and holdout signals, and supporting data science and engineering hiring.

Senior Associate, Data & Analytics

PwCJun 2018–Sep 2021

Led major banks in developing measurable insights, testing and implementing new ideas, mitigating risk, and reducing friction through quantitative analytics, data modeling, and digital strategy.

  • Led analytics engagements for major banks to test and implement new ideas, mitigate risk, and reduce operational friction through quantitative modeling.
  • Developed and tuned financial risk models and classifiers; ran hypothesis testing and monitoring, saving 100+ hours per week in manual review.
More impact
  • Built NLP transaction-screening predictive classifiers in Python using spaCy, scikit-learn, and TensorFlow, and supported deployment across multiple clients.

Summer Data Analyst

Duke HealthMar 2018–Jun 2018

Optimized a fraud identification workflow for one of the largest hospital groups in North America.

  • Designed and implemented fraud and anomaly detection workflows.
  • Built ETL data pipelines, performed data-quality analysis, and drafted data dictionaries.

Data Analyst

HER RealtorsAug 2015–Dec 2016

Developed a real estate price prediction and recommendation system for investor clients, contributing to $5.3M in combined deals.

  • Delivered model outputs through Tableau dashboards and iterated models and features with stakeholders.
  • Built and trained machine-learning models using historical transaction data.

Education

M.S., Data Science (Financial Fraud Analytics)

Duke University20172018

B.S., Accounting & MIS

The Ohio State University20122016

Skills

Data & AI
Python · SQL (Presto, Hive, Spark) · R · NLP · Classification · RAG · LLM evaluation
Experimentation
A/B testing · Causal inference · Cluster and network experiments
Search & ML
Ranking and search evaluation · spaCy · scikit-learn · TensorFlow
Platforms
Tableau · R Shiny · AWS · Linux · Git

Recognition

  • Greatly Exceeds Expectations (Meta, 2022–2024)
  • Going Above and Beyond (PwC, 2020)
  • AWS Technical Professional (2019)
  • Google Analytics IQ (2019)
  • ACFE Member (2018)
  • MVP (Nationwide Insurance, 2015)

Activity

  • FAA Private Pilot