Sam Brotherton is a machine learning engineer and fractional CTO with fifteen years of experience
in a wide range of industries, from music to healthcare to digital advertising. He is currently
available for limited consulting work; please reach out at sam@cairnlabs.com
if you'd like to discuss a project.
2025
Director of Engineering leading several AI/ML teams within Yahoo! Search :
- AI Overviews: AI-powered summaries of search results that trigger on some queries and display in the search results page
- Yahoo Grounding Engine: ETL pipelines, embedding models, indexing, search, and reranking platform powering Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) across Yahoo, including the new AI-first search experience Scout
- Yahoo Knowledge: Yahoo’s internal knowledge graph/semantic web, combining structured data from public sources and Yahoo-owned news, finance, and sports content
2020
Led a remote engineering team to build AI-powered audiovisual
experiences, including a cloud deep learning server for symbolic (MIDI) song generation, a
C++ constraint/transformation library for imposing additional musical style
on its output, and an automated Max/Ableton session for audio generation.
Coordinated with creative and executive teams to balance engineering and IP
development with artistic and business goals. See
Spotify Playlist for examples.
2016
A deep learning based conversational UI framework to power will.i.am’s wireless earphones and other applications.
Backed by Tensorflow, Prolog, and other technologies. Supported multiple languages, extensible dialogue flows, and
a custom knowledge base. Helped will.i.am raise over $100M in funding
and launch the i.am+ platform, which ended up deployed to both the consumer
market on the i.am+ buttons
and to enterprise clients including Deutsche Telekom.