Maria Zontak

Maria Zontak is a highly experienced professional in the field of computer science and artificial intelligence. Currently serving as a Staff Research Engineer at Meta since July 2025, Maria has previously held the position of Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon, where work focused on generative AI solutions for catalog product listings and multi-modal content moderation from January 2020 to July 2025. Prior experience includes a role as Applied Scientist II at Microsoft, specializing in computer vision and AI applications for cloud technology. Maria began a career in academia as a part-time instructor at North Seattle College, teaching undergraduate programming courses in Java and Python. Academically, Maria holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science from the Weizmann Institute of Science, with a thesis on "Internal Statistics of a Single Natural Image," and a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, focusing on defect detection in patterned wafers.