San Francisco, California, United States
I've started external mentoring: https://mentorcruise.com/mentor/ritendradatta/ -- every dollar goes to a non-profit that supports live theater. It's increasingly become impossible for play productions to break even with just ticket sales, so they need supplemental funds. ** Please DON'T SEND CONNECTION REQUESTS unless we know each other -- I have over 10K pending connection requests, with no time or help to manage them. ** Everything I write is my personal view. They never represent the views of my past or present employers, nor reviewed or vetted prior to posting. I am not even authorized to speak on their behalf. I sometimes write notes under the blog named TLDR0: https://tldr0.substack.com/ ** The real 'About me' ** Machine learning leader with AI and ML-related academic and work experience at Google, Facebook, Databricks, IBM Research, Xerox PARC, and Penn State. Managed teams ranging from 2 to 215 engineers and research scientists. Worked on ML, Infra, and algorithms for search, recommender systems, computer vision, data analytics, etc. Completed PhD in applied ML in ~4.5 years right after Bachelors (via 'direct' PhD admission). Started coding at age 8 with GW-BASIC, moved to C/Assembly. In grad school I switched from Theoretical CS to Statistical Modeling and AI/ML, because I love probability and statistics.
I've been building out a new AI/ML team working on a ChatGPT feature, and opportunistically hiring for senior level roles. Ping if you're at the google/meta L7/L8 equivalent level and interested in openai.
Led teams that drove all foundational AI initiatives here. One particularly hard problem was delivering LLM-powered interviewer agents, built on state-of-the-art TTS, STT, and Agentic systems.
Built and managed the Applied AI team, responsible for all AI work that makes the Databricks product smarter, faster, better, more efficient, including the Databricks Assistant, Search, Code Completion, Automatic Data Documentation, Text2SQL, Genie spaces, optimization for Serverless, etc.
Before I left FB, I was managing a 200+ person team of ML and Infra engineers and scientists responsible for Reels and video recommendations. Reels grew massively, largely due to the ranking work on the team. Responsible for Ranking/Recs/Search of Video, Audio, and Gaming, Watch and Videos on Newsfeed. Scaled team from ~30 to 200+.
Google was my first full-time job. When I left, I was managing a team of 30 engineers working on shopping-related searches, shopping ads targeting, query understanding, personalization, etc. Briefly worked on the Google self-driving car's (now Waymo) simulation software as well.