Los Altos, California, United States
I am a senior leader in software development, machine learning, and product management. I enjoy creating and improving large-scale consumer products. I have experience building engaged, cross-functional, diverse, and international organizations. I thrive on bringing different backgrounds, skills, and opinions together in my senior leadership team. I focus on setting strategic long term context, sweat the details, and finish things. I have experience leading teams across all of the following functions: software engineering, data science, deep learning, machine learning, natural language processing, product management, user experience & design, localization, program management, analytics, economics, and site reliability engineering. Methods I am particularly fond of: old fashioned checklists, technical architecture reviews, design thinking to drive user centric innovation, and agile engineering methods like Scrum and Kanban to build software fast and well tested. Working together and coaching smart and motivated people to change the world is why I enjoy coming to work every day. My goal is to make a difference in people's life by developing great products that are used everywhere every day.
I lead the Driver Understanding and Evaluation team at Waymo. Our vision is to make it safe, easy, economical, sustainable, and enjoyable for all people and things to get to their destination. We have gathered an incredible amount of data and invaluable lessons by driving millions of miles with our autonomous vehicles through countless situations on public roads, and have driven billions more miles in simulation. My team of world class experts brings together state of the art research in autonomous vehicles with high performance distributed system engineering, machine learning, and data science to run and evaluate large-scale simulations and all on road driving of the fleet of Waymo Drivers. We work together across the company to improve and scale out Waymo One, our fully autonomous ride-hailing service. Together we are building the world's most trusted driver and commercialization plans to deploy our service across the world over the next few years.
My team builds world class search and discovery experiences that make it effortless to shop online. When customers type a query, we help them to complete and correct their entry. We use advanced machine learning to accurately understand our customers intent expressed as a series of queries or by using their camera. We find the most relevant results in Amazon’s massive product selection and rank them in a way that optimizes customer satisfaction. We decide how products and their attributes, filters, recommendation and informational widgets, navigation, and sponsored content are laid out to help customers easily explore our vast selection and narrow down their choices to a manageable consideration set. The highly scalable, available, and resilient distributed systems are build using the latest machine learning training and inference frameworks, trained on large datasets. We build a search system that combines behavioral, semantic, and lexical search systems that are constantly being improved and every improvement is undergoing rigorous statistical tests and large scale human judgment evaluations. In my team Product Managers, Designers, User Researchers, Engineers, Data Scientists, Economists, Project Managers, and many other specialists work together to build the biggest and best product search system in the world, all in the service of our worldwide customers.
I lead the Search team at Amazon where day millions of people shop for the right product to buy, videos to watch, and music to listen to. Our mission is to combine customer centric design, advanced science, and engineering to build products that understand our customers' shopping intent and show the most relevant products, make recommendations to explore, answer shopping related questions, and help them discover everything Amazon has to offer.
Responsible for eBay’s product catalog and metadata creation, normalization, classification of over 800 million concurrently live items, product search, inventory insights, machine translation, natural language processing, information extraction, and computer vision applications. Set up integrated applied research, data science, and engineering teams across three locations. Built eBay's first machine learning platform to process, enhance, and automatically curate eBay's catalog of items for sale WW.
I led a team of over 130 engineers, scientists, product managers, designers and localization specialists that are improving products and platform capabilities for cross-border trade and international expansion. We are integrating customer centric product innovation with leading edge scientific research to build surprisingly awesome products. ● Led the expansion to Latin America and Russia by combining localized products with machine translation technology resulting in an significant increase in the number of users and transactions in those new markets (> $200 Million in incremental annual GMV) ● Build services for commerce related machine translation and other human language technology micro services ● Made eBay more relevant and user-friendly in every country in the world by streamlining the user experience for all cross border transactions (20% of all transactions on eBay) ● My responsibilities also include overall product responsibility and localization for all Bay sites outside of the United States and strategic alignment between the technology and country business organizations. Starting in 2013 I formed the Human Language Technology (HLT) Research and Development team with the charter to break down the language barrier in global commerce. In 2014 I was the executive sponsor for the acquisition of technology and talent from Apptek, expanding my team to one of the leading research organizations in HLT. Our machine translation service is tightly integrated in to all global eBay sites and serves over 7 billion queries per day in 18 language pairs. We use our large customer and transactional dataset to optimize the quality of the translations for commerce. Our approach is to combine research in natural language processing, statistical machine translation, and semantic understanding with world class engineering and product design to solve for new opportunities and business models in commerce.
My responsibility was to create and lead a world class product and technology organization for eBay in Europe. My initial focus was to drive regional alignment, consolidate the country level organizations and develop innovative products for our European customers. I grew the organization from 30 to over 120 people in three years after an initial reduction in force. ● Consolidated over 400 products and systems and 40 vendors across 10 countries down to less than 20 systems and two vendors. ● Hired a new engineering and product management team that focused only on local differentiators and leveraged common platforms instead of one-off solutions. ● Introduced Scrum and Agile practices for engineering, product management, design and user experience research to iterate ideas faster ● Build test automation across eBay's websites and Android and iOS apps (by extending Selenium) Key products developed under my leadership that drove the turnaround in eBay’s business in Europe between 2008 and 2010 were: daily deals, retailer-like merchandizing, advertising experimentation, and shipping provider integrations. I then led a skunkworks project to develop and launch new local eBay websites in nine new European countries with innovative features like one-click PayPal checkout, an integrated customs calculator, and machine translation to enable seamless cross-border trade. Building the team in Europe I learned how to create a team that uses design thinking for customer driven innovation and to build technically excellent products even in a large and sometimes slowly moving organization. I was also successful in getting the leadership team to understand that innovation requires not only taking risk, pivoting ideas, and hiring world class talent but also rigorous commissioning of unsuccessful products. I was promoted to Senior Director in March 2011.
I had overall product and technology responsibility for the eBay site in Germany, eBay’s second largest market after the US. I led the following teams: interaction design, user experience research, content management, localization, project and portfolio management, software development, quality assurance, and operations. We closely cooperated with the California based technology teams on adaptations to the German market and build additional products like shipping and label printing. I also led the technical due diligence and post acquisition integration for M&A in Germany. Not working at the corporate headquarter, being very close to our customers, and having a cross functional team gave me a unique perspective that I used to drive innovation and to introduce design thinking in our product and technology organizations. Being a member of the German executive team helped me understand what it takes to successfully run a country organization.
Initially in charge of platform migration post acquisition in China and India. Then responsible for all international product development for eBay including the launch of eBay Poland, a joint venture in Taiwan, and various other international projects. In 2005 transitioned to lead an engineering team (14 direct reports) to re-architect eBay’s feedback system. Worked closely with business units and product management to shape and drive the product strategy and implementation roadmap. Co-authored several patents related to feedback in an online marketplace. Led project execution while making sure that the systems were able to perform under high demands for scalability, performance, and security. First reference implementation of a service oriented architecture in eBay. During this time I learned how to build and operate large-scale high availability systems. Career development for the technical managers and leaders in my team was another focus area.
Cambridge Technology Partners was a leading custom software development and system integration company. They were specialized in fixed-time/fixed-price contracts for high risk projects that create immediate bottom-line impact for its clients. Early adopters of object oriented software methodologies, large scale distributed client/server systems, internet technologies and pioneering analytics, data warehouse, and customer relationship management solutions. I led design, development, and project execution for fortune 500 companies in Europe and USA and several start-ups during the dot-com boom in Silicon Valley. During this time I learned how to build and lead multi-functional distributed teams that create products using the latest technology and UX practices with a clear business case for our clients. I led teams of around 30 people for engagements lasting up to two years. Between projects I was also responsible for acquisition of new business and technology research and prototyping.