Ruoming Pang: The Data Engineer Who Meta Paid Over $200 Million To Poach From Apple
Pang worked under the position of 'Distinguished Software Engineer' for Apple for a period of four years from August 2021.
Meta Platforms Inc. hired Ruoming Pang, Apple's former head of its AI models team, for over $200 million dollars to join its 'superintelligence team' according to Bloomberg reports who cited those familiar with the matter.
He will be working as a part of the team for a period of several years. Apple reportedly did not match this offer due to it not paying its department or project leads such a package which is more comparable to the compensation that their Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook receives.
On a solely numerical basis, the superintelligence group has some of the highest compensation for any corporate job, including CEO roles at the world’s major banks, Bloomberg said.
But the payouts depend on performance targets and unlocked via years of staying in the organisation, which means it might not all be obtained if employees leave early or if the stock doesn’t perform well.
Pang worked under the position of 'Distinguished Software Engineer' for Apple for a period of four years from August 2021, according to his LinkedIn page, where he worked on foundation models.
He spent the longest stint of his professional career at Google, where he was co-founder, co-team leader on projects such as 'Bigtable Index' and 'ZipIt' from 2006-2012.
He then went on to co-found Zanzibar, Google’s global consistent authorization system along with Abhishek Parmar and Zhifeng Chen in 2012. Pang served as sole team leader from 2014-2017 for Zanzibar.
From 2017, he led Google Brain’s speech recognition research and product engagement. He served as co-lead on the project with Yonghui Wu and Zhifeng Chen.
Pang worked on development of the Babelfish/Lingvo framework, which is the most heavily used deep learning framework by tensor processing unit usage at Google, ahead of AdBrain and DeepMind.
He was also a key contributor to Tacotron 2, a text-to-speech system for Google.
Pang pursued a Bachelor of Science degree from 1995-1998 from the University Of Shanghai Jiao Tong, then pursued a Master degree in Computer Science from the University Of Southern California, and a Phd in Computer Science from the year 2000-2006.
(With Bloomberg Inputs)
