# Igor Gammer > Experienced engineer with a specific interest in backend, ML and DS Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/igorgammer ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer @ Lyft Jan 2022 – Present | 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. ### Sole Developer @ Private project: Working on monetizing a fully self-developed engine in the field of social gaming. Jan 2020 – Jan 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. ### Principal Software Engineer @ OpenTable Jan 2015 – Jan 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%. ### Lead Data Scientist @ (stealth mode) Jan 2014 – Jan 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. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Livefyre Jan 2012 – Jan 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. ### Senior Analytics Software Engineer @ Marin Software Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 | San Francisco, CA Was responsible for the core analytics engine that processed the cost reports for thousands of corporate clients. Came up with a novel framework for the core engine, designed and implemented that framework, and then rewrote significant parts of the engine in terms of that framework. This resulted in much easier expandability of the engine; a project that required several weeks of engineering time before is now doable in less than an hour. The new framework has been extensively and successfully used to implement customer­-requested features, both by myself and by other engineers. Other projects included duplicate keyword analysis and password complexity changes, the latter implemented in a combination of PHP, Java, Groovy, and GSP. ### Software Development Engineer @ Amazon.com Jan 2008 – Jan 2011 | Greater Seattle Area In the Batch processing team at the Merchant Technologies division: * Responsible for the core batch processing (Feeds and Reports) service that enabled the millions of merchants to sell on the Amazon Marketplace, specifically supporting high-volume merchants, ranging from mid-level stores to national chains, such as Target. * Responsible for the core operation of the business-critical aspect of merchant support. The team processed batch files in different formats, both for input (feeds) and output (reports). Key challenges laid in the sheer volume of transactions (millions of feeds and billions of records daily) as well as the incredibly complex system, built on top of earlier layers over many years, with varying code quality and often non-existent documentation, that required extensive and continuous maintenance but with an absolute business requirement of no downtime. * Heavy operational workload was expected and part of the daily work; on-call weeks typically had 50 or more pages. Was specifically responsible for rewriting significant parts of the system to pay the technical debt; over nine month, decreased our ticket queue by half, from 400 (at the time of joining the team) to 200. This was specifically challenging because, in addition to cleanup and rewriting, extensive daily maintenance and new projects were expected simultaneously. In the Enterprise team: * Rewrote the entire content delivery framework from a legacy monolith to a microservice-based architecture, with specific emphasis on performance under extreme scale and reusability of components. The work, while quite challenging and extensive, was ultimately very successful, adopted by most of the company’s content delivery. * Responsible for supporting some of Amazon’s biggest clients, such as Target, Marks&Spencer and Mothercare. The support ranged from building and maintaining their website (and Amazon presence) to addressing technical, engineering, and operational aspects of their business. ### Software Engineering Intern @ Fisher Investments Jan 2007 – Jan 2007 | San Mateo, CA Worked as a software engineering intern, supporting the IT department of a financial company. Was the principal engineer on a project, responsible for modifying, improving and retrofitting a complex set of tools of high importance to the company. The project had a very strict deadline, which was met successfully despite relatively little time still remaining at the point of starting the internship. The project required a high amount of interaction both within the team, and with the outside business contacts, resulting in correspondingly high demands on teamwork capabilities, as well as the ability to efficiently retrieve requirements from both technical and non­technical contacts. Design and implementation were of utmost importance, as was the ability to rapidly process and understand significant amount of legacy code. A new programming language was learned in the first week of the internship, and used successfully in the remainder of the project. ### Software Engineering Intern @ Visa Jan 2006 – Jan 2006 | Foster City, CA Worked as a software engineering intern, as a part of a team developing an internally used product which empowered various company units to interact efficiently. Was solely responsible for developing, documenting, testing, deploying and maintaining several crucial parts of the product, most of which have been built from scratch and developed into the finished product that is currently being used by the company. Worked with very little supervision throughout the entire term, and succeeded in completing an open­-ended assignment by the deadline. ### Software Engineering Intern @ Ask.com Jan 2005 – Jan 2005 | Oakland, CA Worked as a software engineering intern, was responsible for development and maintenance of the company search engine, designing and implementing specification, and supporting users of the custom feed program. Supporting the engine with consideration of the live servers and necessity of real­time performance was a crucial and essential component of the job. ### Software Engineering Intern @ Homestead Technologies Jan 2004 – Jan 2004 | Menlo Park, CA Worked as a software engineering intern, belonging to a small sub­team focusing on research and development, and specifically exploring new potential areas and applications, within a large team. Was responsible for incorporating the existing product in a brand­-new product bundle and resolving various technology conflicts arising from the interaction. ### Software Engineering Intern @ AOL Jan 2003 – Jan 2003 | Mountain View, CA Worked as a software engineering intern, as a part of a moderately large team. Was solely responsible for developing a new feature, integrating it into existing large codebase, and maintaining it. The feature was and is now used by other teams throughout the entire company. Was responsible for working fast, both alone and as a part of a team; fully designing and defending design of the product; keeping in close contact with Product Manager and implementing customer requirements; and overseeing the product over its lifecycle, including providing technical support to customers of the product. ### Software Engineering Intern @ Plumtree Software Jan 2002 – Jan 2002 | San Francisco, CA Worked as a software engineering intern, developed web applications using ASP, JSP, and C# technologies. Was solely responsible for developing a security system compatible with two different legacy systems (one written in C++, another in Java), as well as featuring a new .NET­-native functionality. ## Education ### Master's in Computer Science : Artificial Intelligence. Emphasis on format methods and First-order logic. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign ### Bachelor's in Computer Science and Mathematics (Double major) University of California, Berkeley ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/igor-gammer --- Source: https://flows.cv/igorgammer JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/igorgammer/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12