MJ Berends

MJ leads search and retrieval at Legion Intelligence. Her work focuses on hybrid retrieval systems, ranking, and generative interfaces for knowledge navigation in agentic AI systems. Prior to Legion, MJ led the engineering team building Sidekick, Shopify’s AI-powered admin assistant, including its LLM fine-tuning, evaluation tooling, and chat interface. Before that, she managed Shopify’s Storefront Search team, rebuilding the end-to-end search stack and lifting search conversion 8% across millions of merchants. Earlier in her career, MJ led search, discovery, and recommendation engineering at Provi, with prior data and ML roles at ActiveCampaign and Jellyvision.