# Aishwarya Vardhana > Product Design (Khan Academy, Collective Intelligence Project, Wikipedia) Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/aishwaryavardhana Product designer with 9 years of experience building public interest technology. I am particularly skilled at designing complex tools. I operate best on small teams building 0-1, in messy ambiguity. I have domain knowledge in: • AI evaluations • Trust and Safety (e.g. product policy, collaboration with Legal & Policy teams) • Media (e.g. familiar with editorial & publishing workflows) • Inclusion and Equity (e.g. designing for a global, multilingual audience and inclusive research practices) I write about technology ethics here: https://makingmeaningfromfeelings.substack.com/ ## Work Experience ### Strategic Advisor @ The Collective Intelligence Project Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area ### Product Designer @ Khan Academy Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area Applying AI to the classroom so that students and teachers can flourish. ### Senior Product Designer @ Wikimedia Foundation Jan 2021 – Jan 2024 Wikipedia is visited by billions of people every month, each looking for information they can trust. • Designed and led the launch of Wikifunctions, an open source platform for a global community of technical and nontechnical contributors to collaboratively create reusable pieces of code. I served as a product partner to the PM. • Designed and launched Wikipedia's first Incident Reporting System, aimed at tracking hundreds of weekly occurences of harassment and abuse across 300 platforms • Designed Automoderator, Wikipedia's first machine learning-powered vandalism detection system - a tool to support moderators and prevent burnout. Automoderator flags thousands of instances of vandalism, weekly. • Cross-functional collaboration with departments such as Security, ML Research, Trust & Safety Legal, Operations, and Policy • Led a multi-year initiative to implement an organization-wide framework for inclusive product development ### Researcher @ Biden for President Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 ### Founding Designer @ Knowhere Jan 2017 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area 3 years at a Series A startup building an AI-enabled newsroom to restore public trust in the news. • Designed an ML-based CMS for the newsroom which published 16,000 articles in three years and grew our audience to 500,000 readers. • Designed an interactive multimedia news platform for ~400,000 daily readers. • Developed our design system. • Collaborated with engineers to ensure consistent and intuitive UI & UX across the CMS and our web experience. • Ran design sprints, executed on rapid prototyping, and conducted regular user testing sessions. • Acquired by Andreessen Horowitz. ### Co-Founder @ Verbatm Co. Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | 421 Bryant Street, SF Verbatm was a class project that grew into a venture-backed startup. Our idea was prior to Snapchat, IG stories, or TikTok. We were inspired by multimedia projects at The New York Times, so we envisioned a mobile-first, multimedia future for content creation. Years later, our vision proved right. • I led the design of Verbatm, a mobile-first platform for creators to tell multimedia stories. • Verbatm was a Matter VC portfolio company. We participated in their 10-week design thinking bootmap. ### Student Advisor to the President @ Stanford Board of Trustees on Investment Responsibility Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 Advised the Stanford Board of Trustees on ethical investing ## Education ### Bachelor of Arts - BA in Art/Art Studies, General Stanford University ### Ethics in Technology + Public Policy for Practitioners Stanford University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/aishwarya-vardhana-a13bba84 - Website: https://www.aishwaryavardhana.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/aishwaryavardhana JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/aishwaryavardhana/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-05