Ashish Gandhe

Director of Engineering at Meta

Greater Seattle Area

About

Engineering Leader with interests and expertise in building and leading teams to achieve exceptional results. At Facebook I’m responsible for leading teams working on machine learning initiatives to provide the best recommendation of Reels / Short form videos to consumers and optimize creator experience on Facebook App. Before that I led machine learning teams for Facebook's commerce initiatives (Shops and Jobs recommendations, Marketplace Search). Before that I led key initiatives at Microsoft to improve Bing’s search relevance and revenue and was responsible for driving improvements to search relevance and several hundred million dollars of incremental revenue annually.

Experience

  • Meta (6 yrs 10 mos)
    • Director of Engineering
      Feb 2025 - Present · 1 yr 5 mos

      I lead the Video consumption relevance organization responsible for improving the recommendations of Videos on Facebook and grow user and business value. We are working on state of the art ML solutions to user problems and modeling related to recommendation of Reels and Videos and directly moving Facebook’s topline visitation and revenue. We are hiring! If you’re an ML engineer passionate about working on state of the art recommendation algorithms and deliver impact to over a billion users, you can apply at the attached job posting. My capacity to respond on linkedin is limited so message me directly only if we're connected or if you're in team-matching stage with Meta.

    • Senior Engineering Manager
      Aug 2021 - Jan 2025 · 3 yrs 6 mos

      2022 - 2025: Video Consumption Relevance - relevance of recommendations of videos (reels and long form videos) on the Facebook app. Delivered significant app visitation and revenue outcome for Facebook. 2021: Recommendation and search for Facebook Commerce Initiatives: Marketplace Search, Facebook Shops recommendations, Jobs on Facebook recommendations https://www.fiercevideo.com/video/meta-over-140b-reels-are-played-daily-instagram-facebook

    • Engineering Manager
      Sep 2019 - Aug 2021 · 2 yrs

      '21: Led New Commerce Initiative Ranking (Shops Recommendations, Commerce Search, Jobs Ranking) '19-20: Led Marketplace Search

  • Microsoft (10 yrs 4 mos)
    • Principal Group Engineering Manager
      Feb 2016 - Sep 2019 · 3 yrs 8 mos

      In Bing I lead team of 20 engineers across 2 global locations working on multiple areas with significant impact: - Optimizing Bing's results page for monetization - Built the machine learning system to optimize ranking, placement and prominence of search results towards revenue and user satisfaction. My team delivered several hundred million dollars of revenue increase every year. - Navigational experience and ranking of deeplinks - We delivered significant improvements to ranking & triggering of deeplinks and rich navigational results. - Rich captions for web results - We delivered significant improvements to Bing's rich snippets and rich answers created from web content leading to a significant competitive edge in this area. Under my leadership, these areas were able to bring Bing quality ahead of Google in key areas.

    • Senior Development Lead
      May 2013 - Feb 2016 · 2 yrs 10 mos

      Tech lead manager of the team of engineers responsible for: - Ranking of deeplinks (sitelinks) on Bing SERP - Improving windows search experience through use of Bing-powered signals for local client search - Relevance of entity experiences (heroes) on search charm.

    • Senior Software Development Engineer
      Jun 2009 - May 2013 · 4 yrs

      As an IC I received Microsoft Gold Star award multiple times (given to top 5% engineers). I worked on several areas within core relevance team and delivered several key improvements to Bing's web ranking. - I was directly responsible for the core modeling technology (FastRank based on Lambdamart) used in Bing for training and prediction of ranking models that lead to significant relevance and agility improvements. - I have worked on and delivered several machine learning techniques including feature engineering, training data optimization and core ranking algorithm that improved relevance across many markets and segments - I was responsible for the architecture design and significant relevance improvements for entity-centric queries on Bing. My experience, skills and interests range from machine learning, architecture to building great teams.

  • Graduate Assistant at Purdue University
    Aug 2007 - May 2009 · 1 yr 10 mos

    Department of Computer Science PhD Student - left to drive impact in the industry.