Jan 2018 – Jan 2024 · 6 yrs · Greater Los Angeles Area

• Engineering Leadership & AI Innovation at Thrive Market
• 🚀 Scaled Engineering Excellence: Led engineering organization from startup phase to 90+ engineers, driving 600% growth in both revenue and membership through strategic technical leadership and team development.
• 📊 Data-Driven Transformation: Directed comprehensive data science, analytics, and engineering initiatives that elevated customer engagement and operational efficiency, positioning Thrive Market as the #1 e-commerce platform for personalization.
• 🤖 AI Innovation Leadership: Pioneered cutting-edge AI implementations using LLMs, embeddings, deep learning, and reinforcement learning to revolutionize product discovery and recommendation systems, resulting in significant member engagement improvements.
• 🔬 Research & Development: Filed 6 patents (3 granted) in AI/ML space and established robust A/B testing frameworks with advanced analytics and visualization tools that transformed business decision-making processes.
• ⚙️ Technical Modernization: Orchestrated comprehensive tech stack evolution including native app refactoring with modern design patterns, monolith-to-microservices architecture migration, and cloud infrastructure optimization using Snowflake, DBT, Kubernetes, and managed services.
• 💰 Operational Excellence: Streamlined e-commerce operations through strategic automation and DevOps implementation, reducing infrastructure costs by 30%+ while enhancing user experience and system reliability.
• 👥 Culture & Team Building: Fostered high-performing engineering culture emphasizing ownership, cross-functional collaboration, and accountability—creating an environment where exceptional talent thrives and delivers market-leading results.

Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 · 3 yrs · Greater Los Angeles Area

• Engineering Leadership & AI-Powered E-commerce Innovation at The Honest Company
• 🎯 Strategic Acquisition & Integration: Following The Honest Company's acquisition of Insnap (which I co-founded), I led the seamless integration of our team and technology stack. Today, Insnap's proprietary IP powers The Honest Company's entire recommendation and personalization engine.
• 👥 Team Leadership & Culture: Mentored and scaled a 60-engineer organization, fostering a dynamic culture of innovation that accelerated project delivery while prioritizing professional growth and technical excellence.
• 🏗️ Data Architecture Transformation: Redesigned The Honest Company's complete data infrastructure, integrating Insnap's advanced data engineering capabilities to process large-scale data pipelines and architect a robust, scalable data warehouse foundation.
• 🤖 AI/ML-Driven Personalization: Pioneered machine learning initiatives that revolutionized e-commerce UX through intelligent customer segmentation, product affinity modeling, and personalized recommendation systems—driving measurable improvements in user engagement and conversion.
• 🔄 Omnichannel Innovation: Orchestrated cross-functional teams to seamlessly merge offline and online business channels, creating a unified customer experience that optimized business efficiency across all touchpoints.
• 📱 Full-Stack Excellence: Enhanced web and mobile app user experiences while accelerating feature delivery velocity across frontend, backend, and data systems through strategic engineering practices and team alignment.
• 🚀 Research & Development: Led advanced AI/ML algorithm research for business optimization, transforming how The Honest Company understands and serves its customers through data-driven insights and automated personalization.

Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 · 2 yrs · San Francisco Bay Area

• Co-Founder & CEO: Insnap (Acquired by The Honest Company, 2016)
• 🚀 From Idea to Acquisition: Co-founded and led Insnap as CEO through the complete entrepreneurial journey—conceptualization, product development, market launch, and successful acquisition by The Honest Company in January 2016.
• 💡 Revolutionary AI Innovation: Pioneered breakthrough AI/ML algorithms that solved the notorious "cold start problem" in mobile personalization. Our technology didn't just recommend products—it understood the deep connections between what customers truly wanted and why they wanted it.
• 💰 Full-Stack Leadership: Secured complete funding, assembled a world-class engineering team, and architected the entire technology stack from ground zero. This foundation became the core recommendation engine and data infrastructure that powers The Honest Company today.
• 📱 Mobile-First Vision: Developed innovative SDK solutions that transformed mobile personalization, enabling apps to deliver intelligent, contextual experiences that dramatically improved user engagement and discovery.
• 🎯 Strategic Market Position: Analyzed emerging market trends to maintain competitive advantage, positioning Insnap at the forefront of mobile UX innovation through data-driven product strategy and visionary leadership.
• 👥 Culture & Team Building: Cultivated a collaborative, high-performance culture that accelerated both productivity and breakthrough innovation—proving that the right team with the right vision can revolutionize entire industries.

Jan 2013 – Jan 2017 · 4 yrs

• As a key advisor to the CEO and technology team at FAMA, I provided strategic guidance on the development of core AI/ML and SaaS algorithms to enhance the platform’s risk profile accuracy. I also led the design of the company's big data architecture for risk profiling and influenced key hiring decisions to boost overall team efficiency.

Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 · 2 yrs · Pleasanton, CA

• Building Workday's AI/ML Future Through Strategic Acquisition Integration
• 🏗️ Team & Technology Integration: Following Workday's acquisition of Identified, I built and led a powerhouse team of 30 data scientists, engineers, and analysts while orchestrating the seamless integration of Identified's cutting-edge technology stack into Workday's enterprise platform.
• 🚀 Market-Leading Innovation: Spearheaded the inception and development of AI/ML-driven Insight applications that transformed how organizations understand their workforce. Our breakthrough products—including retention risk prediction and intelligent career path recommendations—established Workday's market leadership in predictive HR analytics.
• 📈 Recognition & Impact: Our innovations garnered significant industry attention, including coverage in The New York Times, validating our approach to solving complex workforce challenges through advanced AI: https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/05/workday-to-put-employees-through-a-big-data-analysis/?smid=pl-share
• 🔬 Research & Development Excellence: Led large-scale data exploration and mining initiatives, applying sophisticated AI/ML algorithms to extract actionable insights from complex workforce datasets and deliver game-changing data products to market.
• ⚡ High-Performance Culture: Cultivated a top-tier data organization that became Workday's innovation engine, fostering cross-disciplinary growth in analytics, data science, and engineering while establishing engineering practices that prioritized both speed and quality.
• 🎯 Strategic Product Impact: Pioneered predictive modeling approaches that fundamentally reshaped product strategies, transforming how Workday approaches workforce analytics and positioning the company as the definitive leader in AI-powered HR solutions.

Jun 2012 – Nov 2013 · 1 yr 5 mos · Menlo Park

• Data Science Leadership & User Identity Innovation
• Team Building Excellence: Built and scaled a high-impact data science organization from 0 to 20 members, encompassing data scientists, analysts, and engineers. Implemented mentorship programs and development frameworks that accelerated team productivity and technical capabilities.
• Strategic User Identity Transformation: Developed predictive models and advanced ML solutions that revolutionized user identity services, driving measurable improvements in profile completion rates and user retention across millions of active users.
• Large-Scale Algorithm Optimization: Deployed sophisticated data mining and statistical analysis to optimize timeline and news feed algorithms, significantly enhancing content relevance and user engagement at enterprise scale.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Partnered with Product and Engineering teams to translate complex analytics into actionable business insights, directly informing strategic decisions that shaped the user experience roadmap and product development priorities.
• Data-Driven Impact Framework: Established comprehensive metrics and measurement systems to optimize user interaction patterns, resulting in significant improvements across key engagement KPIs and long-term user value metrics.

Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 · 1 yr · Los Gatos

• Machine Learning Leadership at Netflix
• Search & Discovery Innovation: Architected and deployed large-scale ML algorithms that increased search CTR and precision by 10% each, directly improving content discovery for millions of Netflix members and enhancing user experience at global scale.
• Strategic Demand Forecasting: Developed advanced predictive models to forecast content value and audience demand, enabling data-driven investment decisions for Netflix's multi-billion dollar content acquisition strategy.
• Personalized Recommendation Systems: Led research initiatives that delivered personalized experiences across millions of users, significantly improving engagement metrics and viewing hours through sophisticated content matching algorithms.
• Production ML Infrastructure: Partnered with backend engineering teams to optimize big data pipelines and streamline ML model deployment, reducing inference latency while maintaining enterprise-level system reliability.
• Measurable Business Impact: Delivered algorithms that directly influenced strategic content decisions and improved critical business metrics including member retention, satisfaction scores, and overall platform engagement.

Jan 2008 – Jan 2011 · 3 yrs · Greater Los Angeles Area

• AI/ML Engineering & Ad Technology Innovation
• Advanced User Segmentation: Designed and implemented AI/ML algorithms that categorized users into 2000+ custom interest segments, significantly enhancing ad targeting precision and driving measurable improvements in campaign performance.
• Predictive Modeling at Scale: Developed and deployed production-ready AI/ML models that optimized user ad click probability, achieving a 50%+ improvement in click-through rates and substantially boosting revenue.
• Demographic Intelligence: Built AI/ML algorithms to predict user demographics from online behavioral patterns, enabling more sophisticated audience targeting and strategic ad placement optimization.
• Data-Driven Revenue Growth: Analyzed complex user interaction data to drive strategic ad placements, refined segmentation algorithms, and delivered higher precision targeting that directly increased ad revenue.
• Product Innovation Leadership: Spearheaded the conception, research, and development of PreSearch—an AI-powered keyword marketplace for display advertising that set new industry standards.
• Strategic Business Impact: Contributed to Fox Audience Network's successful acquisition by The Rubicon Project while leading AI integration initiatives that established industry benchmarks for ad targeting accuracy.

Jan 2004 – Jan 2008 · 4 yrs · San Francisco Bay Area

• ML Algorithm Innovation & Ad Technology Leadership
• Behavioral Targeting Breakthrough: Pioneered advanced ML algorithms for behavioral targeting that increased display ad CTR by up to 300% over baseline performance, delivering exceptional ROI improvements for advertising campaigns.
• Automated Risk Detection: Implemented intelligent ML/AI algorithms for content risk detection that completely automated editorial processes, eliminating manual review workload while maintaining quality standards.
• Landing Page Intelligence: Developed relevance scoring and risk classification algorithms for advertiser landing pages using ML/AI, achieving 100% automation of manual review processes and dramatically reducing ad approval time-to-market.
• Smart Recommendation Systems: Created collaborative filtering algorithms that delivered intelligent keyword suggestions to advertisers, significantly improving both CTR performance and conversion rates across campaigns.
• Search Relevance Optimization: Enhanced search engine algorithms using machine learning techniques, achieving a 50% improvement in search relevance and user satisfaction metrics.

Jan 2004 – Jan 2004 · 0 mo · Dallas/Fort Worth Area

• Enterprise Systems Development & Optimization
• Unified Business Platform: Designed and developed a comprehensive web-based system integrating provisioning, sales, and invoicing operations across multiple product lines using Java/J2EE architecture, streamlining critical business processes.
• System Reliability Enhancement: Refined and optimized system functionalities to ensure robust, error-free sales and provisioning operations, improving operational efficiency and reducing system downtime.

Jan 2001 – Jan 2003 · 2 yrs · Roanoke, Virginia Area

• Teaching & Academic Support Excellence
• Laboratory Leadership: Managed lab operations and provided targeted technical assistance to students, ensuring seamless hands-on learning experiences and optimal lab functionality.
• Curriculum Delivery: Delivered comprehensive lectures on Computer Networks & Architecture, Software Engineering, and C++ programming, effectively enhancing student comprehension and technical proficiency.
• Student Development: Graded assignments and provided detailed constructive feedback, supporting both undergraduate and graduate students' academic growth and technical skill development.
• Collaborative Learning Environment: Fostered an inclusive, supportive academic atmosphere that promoted student success and collaborative problem-solving across diverse learning levels.

Jan 2000 – Jan 2001 · 1 yr · Noida Area, India

• Mobile Application Development & Workflow Automation
• Enterprise Workflow Solutions: Designed and implemented mobile applications that automated organizational workflows and integrated seamless communication between mobile and in-office employees, streamlining operations across distributed teams.
• Field Service Optimization: Developed key interfaces and synchronization functionality for automated work allocation systems serving field service and repair technicians, delivering significant improvements in client operational efficiency and productivity.
• Custom Application Development: Analyzed client requirements and developed a tailored C++ application that enhanced field technician coordination and operational output, directly addressing specific business needs and performance objectives.