Todd Wasson

I work at the intersection of large-scale Recommender Systems and frontier generative AI. Over the last 15+ years, I’ve had the opportunity to help build and scale personalization ecosystems at Spotify, Netflix, and LinkedIn. My recent work centers on the industry's architectural shift away from legacy, embedding-centric frameworks toward generative recommenders and model-heavy LLMs. I focus on both designing these new architectures and guiding the cross-functional engineering organizations required to make this paradigm shift a reality. Recently, this has involved steering broad efforts to evaluate and adapt open-weight LLMs for recommendation, and helping shape the strategy and tactics for how this pivot scales across a massive technical ecosystem. Coming from a background as a Ph.D. scientist and Principal Investigator at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, I work to bring a rigorous, hypothesis-driven approach to engineering. Ultimately, my goal is to bridge foundational science with pragmatic deployment, helping teams build novel, personalized experiences for hundreds of millions of users.