Lalit Balla — Director of Engineering
AI & Data Science leader with 18+ years of experience driving product impact through decision science, experimentation, and scaled AI/GenAI across marketplaces, payments, risk, compliance, fraud & safety and customer support. Leading a global 80+ team at Airbnb, owning customer support AI Assistant north-star metrics, experimentation, LLM quality, product instrumentation, guardrail metrics, and launch/ramp analytics to improve containment, resolution, and cost efficiency. Building and scaling applied sciences and agentic analytics capabilities that move ML innovation from research to production enabling metric-layer standardization, autonomous insight generation, and faster roadmap and investment decisions. Trusted partner to senior leadership, influencing AI strategy, operating models, cross-functional execution while hiring and developing high-performance, innovation-driven teams.
Stackforce AI infers this person is a Data Science and AI leader in the SaaS and Fintech industries.
Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Experience: 18 yrs 7 mos
Skills
- Artificial Intelligence (ai)
- Product Development
Career Highlights
- 18+ years in AI and Data Science leadership.
- Expert in driving product impact through decision science.
- Proven track record in building high-performance teams.
Work Experience
Airbnb
Director, Applied Data Science (3 yrs 7 mos)
Apple
Senior Manager, Data Science (6 yrs 2 mos)
HP
Manager, HP.COM Data Science (1 yr 4 mos)
Solutions Manager B2B eCommerce Data Science (1 yr)
Hewlett-Packard
Strategy & Analytics Expert (11 mos)
Sales Analytics Specialist (2 yrs 1 mo)
Customer Intelligence Project Manager (1 yr 5 mos)
Business Analyst (2 yrs 2 mos)
Education
MBA at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
B.E at Visvesvaraya Technological University
Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) at St.Xavier's Institution, Kolkata
High School at St.Augustine's Day School