Kevin Coleman — Engineering Leader

Skip to profile

Why don’t you have a LinkedIn profile?

Read why<br>Close

The short version is that the incentives are misaligned. A professional network<br>that centralizes employment history, relationships, and contact details creates an<br>unusually valuable dataset for scraping, cross-referencing, and breach-based<br>enrichment. The platform captures the upside; its users absorb most of the privacy<br>risk.

The feed has the same incentive problem. It rewards reach, repetition, and<br>self-promotion more reliably than accuracy or useful discussion, so engagement bait<br>and spam crowd out the conversations I would actually want to read. I would rather<br>publish a small page I control and spend my attention elsewhere.

Kevin Coleman

Engineering Leader | ML Engineering, Trust & Safety

Vietnam<br>Contact info

Current<br>Career break

Email Kevin<br>View GitHub

About

I’m an engineering leader focused on ML engineering, trust and safety, and<br>distributed systems. Most recently at Grab, I designed and led multimodal<br>moderation systems serving millions of daily transactions, built an engineering<br>team from the ground up, and partnered across Product, Risk, and Operations on<br>safety, fraud, and abuse prevention. I’m currently taking a career break in Vietnam.

Experience

2026–Present

Career break

Vietnam

Taking a career break following six years leading ML engineering and safety<br>systems at Grab.

2020–2026

Principal Engineer, Safety & Content Moderation

Grab

Designed and led a multimodal, multi-tier content moderation engine using<br>tuned LLMs and AI at scale, supporting image, text, and video across millions<br>of daily transactions.

Partnered across Product, Risk, and Operations to build user-facing safety<br>features, fraud detection systems, and abuse prevention protocols.

Architected Grab’s React eKYC experience with ML-based facial recognition,<br>modular case management, and distributed microservices.

Built and mentored a high-performing engineering team; owned the vertical’s<br>roadmap, OKRs, and hiring.

2019–2020

Tech Lead, Software Engineering

Yelp Ads

Re-architected the ad bidding engine for granular targeting without adding<br>latency, increasing campaign precision.

Designed a generalized campaign framework to improve filtering and<br>scalability across the ad marketplace.

Led a cross-organization keyword targeting project that expanded ad delivery<br>inventory for growth business categories.

Presented long-term ad platform initiatives across Yelp’s global offices.

2019

Team Lead, Ruby on Rails

Captrav

Led development of a Rails MVP that parsed and analyzed millions of dollars<br>in travel invoices from enterprise email and PDF attachments.

Designed an information extraction and indexing pipeline for more than<br>500,000 travel-technology emails.

Migrated batch jobs to AWS Lambda, reducing email processing time from four<br>hours to 20 minutes.

2015–2018

Senior Software Engineer

Zugata

Built recommendation-driven mass email systems for feedback requests at an HR<br>technology startup that raised $10 million and was acquired by Culture Amp.

2013–2015

Senior Software Engineer

Spark Start

Delivered full-stack Ruby on Rails applications that brought early-stage<br>business ideas to life.

2012–2013

Software Engineer

Ticket Alternative

Developed full-stack Ruby on Rails applications for a ticketing platform that<br>sold more than 500,000 tickets.

2011–2012

Software Engineer

CareerBuilder

Built C# and ASP.NET systems for knowledge discovery and indexing across<br>1.5 million applicant résumés per month.

Education

Georgia Institute of Technology

Bachelor of Science, Electrical Engineering

Co-Op designation

Skills

ML Engineering<br>Trust & Safety<br>Engineering Leadership<br>Distributed Systems<br>Golang<br>Python<br>JavaScript<br>React<br>React Native<br>Ruby on Rails<br>AWS<br>Terraform<br>Docker<br>PostgreSQL<br>Elasticsearch<br>Redis<br>Pub/Sub<br>Recruiting

Profile details

Location<br>Vietnam

Current status<br>Career break

Email<br>[email protected]

GitHub

github.com/kevincolemaninc

Areas of focus

ML at scale<br>Multimodal systems, LLMs, and human-in-the-loop decisions

Trust & Safety<br>Content moderation, fraud detection, and abuse prevention

Technical leadership<br>Architecture, roadmaps, hiring, mentorship, and cross-functional delivery

More from Kevin

Projects & awards<br>Products, tools, open source work, and hackathon projects

Writing<br>Essays on engineering, systems, and technology