Harsha Ponnada

CTO

Sunnyvale, California, United States7 yrs 2 mos experience

Highly Stable

Key Highlights

Led Ads Quality roadmap at Google Maps.
Built Ads auction system from scratch at xAI.
Co-authored paper presented at ACL 2017.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Machine Learning and Software Engineering expert in the SaaS industry.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Machine LearningAds AuctionNatural Language Processing

Other Skills

Ads Conversion modelingAds bidding modelsAlgorithmsArtificial Neural NetworksBack-End Web DevelopmentCC++Competitive ProgrammingComputer ScienceData StructuresDeep LearningGit hubJavaJavaScriptLinux

Experience

7 yrs 2 mos

Total Experience

2 yrs 11 mos

Average Tenure

1 yr 3 mos

Current Experience

Xai

Member of Technical Staff

Mar 2025 – Present · 1 yr 3 mos

Head of X Ads Marketplace
Joined as a Senior and promoted to Staff SWE in 6 months
Built a new Ads auction for X from scratch
Worked on Ads bidding models
Worked on SOTA transformer based foundation models for Ads response predictions

Ads auctionAds bidding modelsMachine LearningTransformer modelsAds Auction

Google

3 roles

Senior Software Engineer

Promoted

Apr 2023 – Mar 2025 · 1 yr 11 mos · Mountain View, California, United States

Tech Lead for Google Maps Ads Quality: ML & Auction
Singlehandedly led roadmaps for Maps Promoted Places Ads Quality: modeling and auction for 2 consecutive years and beyond
Led auction and modeling(pCTR, pConvs, pView) launches which made Google Maps an incremental revenue of XXX%(XXXM$), XX% improvement in User relevance and XX% improvement in advertiser value.
Led a team of 4 members in Maps Ads Quality
Tools: Python, Tensorflow, C++, Java
Skills: Ads Conversion modeling, Ads Auction, Ads CTR modeling, Neural Networks, Machine Learning.

PythonTensorflowC++JavaAds Conversion modelingAds Auction+2

Software Engineer III

Sep 2021 – Apr 2023 · 1 yr 7 mos · Mountain View, California, United States

Maps Monetization, Google Ads.
Building personalized ads recommendations in Google Maps

Software Engineer II

Jul 2019 – Mar 2021 · 1 yr 8 mos · Bangalore Urban, Karnataka, India

Editors AI team, Google Workspace.
Lead & Owner for delivering Autocorrect and SmartCompose features in Google Slides which are a core part of Google Workspace now with 1B$ monthly active users.
Grammar, stylistic suggestions in Google Docs & Slides.

Indian institute of technology, kharagpur

2 roles

Teaching Assistant, Combinatorics and Computing

Jan 2019 – May 2019 · 4 mos

Teaching Assistant, Algorithms and Data Structures

Jul 2018 – Dec 2018 · 5 mos

Google

Software Engineer Intern

May 2018 – Jul 2018 · 2 mos · Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Grammar Explanations: Help users understand grammar suggestions produced by neural models in Google Docs by synthesizing an explanation text for the model's suggestion using natural language techniques.

Cnerg - complex networks research group, iit kharagpur

Undergraduate NLP Researcher

Apr 2016 – Aug 2016 · 4 mos · Kharagpur

Developed a transductive learning approach for identifying derivative nouns in Sanskrit Language.
Co-author for the paper accepted for inclusion in ACL 2017 and presentation in TextGraphs-11, ACL 2017.