Sergey Polyashov

Sergey Polyashov is a Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft in Belgrade, Serbia, where he leads the Web Data Platform powering Bing, Ads, and Copilot. He oversees infrastructure that serves over 1 trillion documents, manages 100+ petabytes of data, and processes trillions of ML features daily, impacting hundreds of millions of users worldwide.

With over 15 years of experience in AI-powered platforms and distributed systems, Sergey has a proven track record of building and scaling search and recommendation systems. At Microsoft, he transformed Bing Shopping into an AI-powered ecosystem with 30+ billion offers, achieving 30% CTR increase and multi-million-dollar revenue growth while integrating conversational shopping into Microsoft Copilot. Previously at Yandex, he founded and launched Yandex.Shopping (Russia's largest search-integrated retail vertical), built a unified video platform handling 20,000+ RPS and 30+ PB monthly traffic, and led ML teams of 50+ engineers across multiple products.

Sergey specializes in machine learning infrastructure, LLM integration, search and information retrieval, and large-scale distributed systems. He's an expert in C++ and Python with deep experience in ML ranking systems, recommender systems, and real-time data processing. His technical leadership spans from low-level distributed systems to high-level AI applications, including query understanding, personalization, and multimodal enrichment. Throughout his career, he has successfully led global engineering teams, delivered innovations serving hundreds of millions of users, and driven multi-billion-dollar business impact while actively contributing to the ML community through conferences and mentoring.