Experience
2022 — Now
2022 — Now
San Francisco, California, United States
Working in the Incentive Platform, responsible for directing more than a billion worth of Lyft incentive, targeting riders and drivers, to increase engagement and maximize return. We use state-of-the-art AI and ML models to run real-time campaigns and are responsible both for their continuous improvement and all operational aspects.
As a result of my work, the company has increased ARR by more than $35 million, 85% of which resulted from campaigns savings and 15% from increased workflow, all of which proved with real-life data.
2020 — 2022
San Francisco, California, United States
Social gaming is an incredibly interesting and enticing field, increasingly attracting the minds and souls of people. I embarked on a project to create a platform for the millions of people playing a specific, well-known game. This project has successfully completed - I can share details in a conversation.
2015 — 2020
2015 — 2020
San Francisco Bay Area
* Led development of OpenTable flagship product: the core reservation system, powering the ability to make thousands of daily reservations for millions of people and restaurants, across the globe.
* Increased annual revenue by **$3.175 million** through several successful A/B tests alone (that is, without including the core development work I have done simultaneously).
* Over my five-year tenure, I wrote significant parts of the current fundamental platform-level code powering the product, from both sides: its Machine Learning component, and its backend component, responsible for communicating with the rest of the company’s services and ultimately booking a reservation, as well as search optimization, monetization, ranking, autocomplete, ML- and heuristic-based advertisement.
* Inter-team communication and leadership: I interacted with other teams to a high extent, both initiating such interactions and serving as our team’s primary point of contact for all queries, and led several joint multi-team efforts. My proactiveness and ownership have been heavily prized both within our team and beyond.
* Business leadership and project management: instead of just writing code because it was assigned, I analyze the business requirements of the project, work with the stakeholders to understand what they actually need, frequently write the technical task description in detail, and then implement it. I view the engineering side as not existing alone, but contributing to the company’s business, and strive to deliver on technical tasks with the business needs in mind.
* Significant responsibility for mentoring, recruiting, and intern leadership. I was the Engineering Leader of the OpenTable summer intern program two summers in a row, and acted as a company representative to increase the interns’ satisfaction with their experience, filling in a much needed void in intern engagement with their teams, ultimately resulting in increasing the full-time offer rate acceptance to 90%.
2014 — 2015
2014 — 2015
San Francisco, CA
Led the Data Science effort for a stealth-mode startup focusing on parsing Twitter messages with specific goal of using sentiment analysis to determine the brand adherence and loyalty of the customer. The end goal is a mapping of major brands to a list of customers that would be significantly more interested than average in that company's brand, current product, and new offerings.
Worked in dual mode - both as a team lead (for a team of three engineers and one Data Scientist) and architect, as well as an individual contributor to the project. At the end of the project, we developed a working model and created a set of deliverables, together with the ability to quickly create more deliverables with different conditions as desired. The next step is for the marketing and sales team.
2012 — 2014
2012 — 2014
San Francisco, CA
Worked as a Senior Software Engineer. Was responsible for the core analytics engine that processed millions of comments in realtime, for a large range of customers, from extremely well-known and hightraffic organizations to small bloggers, with support for posting, moderation, and analytics, including NLP-level analytics. Key achievements included:
● Developing an analytics tool for automatically detecting “hot” comment sections based on traffic, recency, and other metrics related to indications of social activity.
● Fully redesigning and developing the main moderation tool for site admins that supported very high throughput and instantaneous feedback, together with automated decision making to help the moderator (had the role of the primary backend engineer for the entire project).
● Designing, developing, integrating, and maintaining a social media curating engine, allowing nontechnical account managers to use the visual configuration tools to set up a constant curation stream of Facebook messages matching certain criteria onto a blog or comment section.
● [Primary Data Science contribution] Designing, developing, and deploying (from scratch to a successful production release) the company’s own NLP-based automated content contextual categorization and filtering engine, supporting content classification across different contextual labels, such as abusive, offensive, or insulting content, with support for moderator-editable rules to automatically act on comments with respect to the decision of the categorization engine.
Education
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Master's
University of California, Berkeley