Inside Plus: Yefei Peng, Vice President of Data

Dr. Yefei Peng has more than 15 years of experience in the areas of machine learning, data mining and predictive modeling. He worked as a machine learning scientist at Yahoo and Google before taking a senior engineering position at Uber, where he led the company’s pricing program and China growth platform. Yefei later served as senior director of engineering at one of the world’s largest fintech companies where he oversaw the company’s AI-driven digital finance platform.

Q: Tell us about your background and why you decided to join Plus.

A: “I have worked on data and machine learning my entire career. The self-driving industry has come a long way, especially the development of autonomous trucks in the last few years. Plus has already accomplished a lot in commercializing its first product and it made me want to join and be a part of this exciting adventure to transform the trucking industry with advanced technology.”

Q: Describe your role at Plus.

A: “Self-driving systems are powered by machine learning models and generate a huge amount of data. My team’s focus is to gain valuable insights from data and extract high quality data for learning in order to continuously improve our autonomous driving technology. We collect and process large volumes of data in real-time and offline to drive our automated learning and validation process, and build highly scalable infrastructure.”

Q: Describe the Plus culture.

A: “Building self-driving trucks is a major undertaking that requires deep integration of several engineering disciplines. We have a top-notch team with people from very diverse backgrounds and expertise. While we each use our individual creativity and problem-solving skills, we also collaborate a lot across the engineering team and with other departments.”

Q: What do you find most rewarding about your job?

A: “I enjoy a deep sense of satisfaction and fulfillment when we deliver our product directly to our fleet customers, and hear feedback and endorsement from them. It is quite unique and rewarding to see the advanced models and software systems we build run on our customers’ vehicles and improve long-haul logistics today, as we continue to expand the capabilities of our systems.”

Q: How do you spend your downtime?

A: “I spend time with my wife and kids. I enjoy hiking. I used to be on the mountaineering team in college. I’ve run 13 marathons. The pandemic is making it harder to train and compete, but I recently completed a half-marathon and am very proud of it.”

Plus is hiring. Follow Plus on LinkedIn for more updates on our journey to shape the future of autonomous trucking.