Kevin Coleman

Kevin Coleman

Engineering Leader | ML Engineering, Trust & Safety

Vietnam · Contact info

Current Career break

Email Kevin View GitHub

About

I’m an engineering leader focused on ML engineering, trust and safety, and distributed systems. Most recently at Grab, I designed and led multimodal moderation systems serving millions of daily transactions, built an engineering team from the ground up, and partnered across Product, Risk, and Operations on 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 systems at Grab.

2020–2026

Principal Engineer, Safety & Content Moderation

Grab

• Designed and led a multimodal, multi-tier content moderation engine using tuned LLMs and AI at scale, supporting image, text, and video across millions of daily transactions.
• Partnered across Product, Risk, and Operations to build user-facing safety features, fraud detection systems, and abuse prevention protocols.
• Architected Grab’s React eKYC experience with ML-based facial recognition, modular case management, and distributed microservices.
• Built and mentored a high-performing engineering team; owned the vertical’s roadmap, OKRs, and hiring.

2019–2020

Tech Lead, Software Engineering

Yelp Ads

• Re-architected the ad bidding engine for granular targeting without adding latency, increasing campaign precision.
• Designed a generalized campaign framework to improve filtering and scalability across the ad marketplace.
• Led a cross-organization keyword targeting project that expanded ad delivery 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 in travel invoices from enterprise email and PDF attachments.
• Designed an information extraction and indexing pipeline for more than 500,000 travel-technology emails.
• Migrated batch jobs to AWS Lambda, reducing email processing time from four hours to 20 minutes.

2015–2018

Senior Software Engineer

Zugata

Built recommendation-driven mass email systems for feedback requests at an HR 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 business ideas to life.

2012–2013

Software Engineer

Ticket Alternative

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

2011–2012

Software Engineer

CareerBuilder

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

Education

Georgia Institute of Technology

Bachelor of Science, Electrical Engineering

Co-Op designation

Skills

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