Our GroupMeet the team

Michael Busch used to be the tech lead for Twitter's search infrastructure. He designed and implemented the realtime search index that drives Twitter's search products and APIs. Prior to Twitter Michael worked at IBM on enterprise search and ediscovery applications. Michael has been Lucene committer and Apache member for many years. As a volunteer he helps with software projects at the non-profit organization Amplio (formerly Literacy Bridge).

Jason Sobel is Chief Technology Officer at The New York Times. Prior to that he was the Head of Infrastructure at Airbnb. His teams build all the company's foundational technology including developer tooling, production and data infrastructure, and UX frameworks. Prior to taking the Infrastructure role, Jason spent 3 years protecting Airbnb's community as part of the Trust team, where he managed teams across engineering, analytics, and customer care. Before joining Airbnb, Jason spent time as the Vice President of Engineering at Quantifind, an Engineering Director at Facebook, and a Member of Technical Staff at NetApp. He holds a Bachelors and Masters degree in Computer Science from Brown University.

Jan is the Vice President Of Engineering at Tally Inc. Prior to Tally, she was a Senior Director of Engineering at Twitter, where she led the Growth, Connect, Home, Analytics and Client Engineering organizations for Twitter’s Consumer engineering organization. Prior to joining Twitter, Jan ran client and server development at OnLive, a cloud gaming platform. Jan graduated from Stanford with a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Computer Science and a doctorate in Management Science and Engineering. In 2013, Jan was named one of 21 Rising Technical Superstars by Hackbright Academy.

VP Eng and Site Lead Coinbase India. Previously as director of Engineering at Google, Pankaj headed the global Google Pay Consumer eng team. Google acquired Pankaj’s AI/ML startup called Halli Labs in its first acquisition in India in 2017. Pankaj was an early employee at Twitter in San Francisco where he held various engineering and management roles -- including heading the Personalization and Recommendations team which was responsible for many of Twitter's search, discovery and relevance products. He has previously founded two startups (both acquired). He has a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Computer Science, and has published more than 30 research papers and 20 patents.

Miguel leads the Platform Engineering organization at Brex, which also includes all Data teams. Previously he led the Consumer Data Science at Twitter, a 70+ people global organization responsible for all aspects of data science, data engineering, and Analytics for Twitter's consumer products. In his 9-year tenure at Twitter he's built & led multiple data science and engineering teams. Previously, he was a doing research in UMD's Human Computer Interaction lab. He has a BS in Computer Engineering.

Maxwell Krohn is the head of Security Engineering at Zoom. He was previously the CEO/co-founder of KeyBase.com (acquired by Zoom), CTO and co-founder of TheSpark.com, SparkNotes.com and OkCupid.com. He earned a PhD in Computer Science from MIT in 2008 with a focus on operating systems and security. In 2015, he cofounded Keybase, a company that makes cryptography more practical, through better user-experience, key management, identity management and team management. He now serves as Keybase's CEO.

Babak, founder of PrimeSet and SpecializedTypes, was an early Facebook and Twitter employee. He created the very popular Twitter TypeAhead (autocomplete) for users and queries. He also launched user search at twitter and worked on search at facebook. Babak worked on Yahoo Search Monetization and Oracle's clustering solution. He owns patents in search and distributed systems and advises several companies.

Anand is the Site Lead for Google Bangalore, and an Engineering Director in Search. He joined Google in California in 2008 and worked in Enterprise, Gmail Ads and YouTube in Mountain View before moving to Bangalore in Aug 2013. He has since worked on Enterprise Platforms, and currently leads Search projects in Bangalore. In prior life, he has invested ~10 years in designing, coding, and managing teams working in various aspects of Computer Networking. He fondly remembers the day when his startup Sahasra Networks was acquired by Cypress Semiconductor. He treasures the company of his B.Tech classmates from IIT Madras and Masters friends from Stanford University. He enjoys playing chess, running, word puzzles, sanskrit and listening to indian classical music. His cofounder and he enjoy ​nurturing their 2 startups aged 11 and 8.

Amir Salek is currently a Senior Director of Engineering at Google where he started and has been leading Google Infrastructure's chip development organization. His organization has developed and delivered multiple lines of chip products such as the TPU family (including Google’s 1st production ASIC) and EdgeTPUs. Over the past two decades, Amir has developed custom silicon for a range of market segments such as Networking, Graphics, Video, Mobile Application Processors and Machine Learning. Prior to joining Google in 2013, Amir was a Senior Director of engineering at Nvidia for 8 years where he contributed to and led various aspects of Nvidia's GPU and Tegra product development.

Amir received a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California. Limited Partner.

Ali is the CEO and co-founder of Databricks, responsible for the growth and international expansion of the company. He previously served as the VP of Engineering and Product Management before taking the role of CEO in January 2016. In addition to his work at Databricks, Ali serves as an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley and is on the board at UC Berkeley’s RiseLab. Ali was one of the creators of open source project, Apache Spark, and ideas from his academic research in the areas of resource management and scheduling and data caching have been applied to Apache Mesos and Apache Hadoop. Ali received his MBA from Mid-Sweden University in 2003 and PhD from KTH/Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden in 2006 in the area of Distributed Computing.

Early-stage investor and advisor. Cofounder and CTO, Simple. Platform Lead and early employee, Twitter.

As the Chief Scientist at Pushd, Alek is responsible for Machine Learning and Computer Vision R&D. Over the course of his career he has been involved in a variety of large scale applied ML, ranging from spam detection to user modeling. He co-founded Personalogy, Inc., later acquired by AOL. He holds a PhD from the University of Manchester (UMIST).

Ajay Patel, Senior Vice President and General Manager of VMware’s Cloud Provider Software Business Unit, leads the team that develops cloud software and services. He manages one of the world’s largest Cloud and Manage Services Provider ecosystems through its VMware Cloud Provider Program. In this capacity, Ajay is responsible for product development, go-to-market, solutions development, sales and marketing, and all partner operational systems for the service provider segment. Ajay’s team is also responsible for driving VMware’s multi-cloud strategy and go-to-market of VMware Cloud Services. Previously, Ajay help build and subsequently led vCloud Air, VMware’s cloud service business.

Prior to VMware, Ajay led the core middleware business, Cloud Application Foundation, at Oracle. He led Oracle Exalogic, a middleware engineered system, and Oracle WebLogic, a Java EE Application Server, which was #1 in the market during his entire tenure. He also launched Oracle Java Cloud Service and set the roadmap for Oracle’s private cloud solution.

Ajay has over 25 years of enterprise software expertise and was also SVP at Apigee (Sonoa Systems) and GM for BEA Systems, Data Services business. His prior experience includes management consulting and system integration with Price Waterhouse Coopers, EDS and AT&T.

Ajay holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Electrical Engineering and a Bachelor’s of Science in Computer Science from University of California, Irvine. Ajay previously served as the Treasurer and board member for Cloud Foundry Foundation. He is also a board member and technical adviser to several private & venture funded software companies.

As Co-founder and CEO of RevOps, Adam Ballai has been helping businesses save time through better user experiences and revenue automation. With his humble beginnings as the first engineer at Twilio, and engineering leader at Stripe, Adam likes to help companies with their monetization infrastructure and pricing strategies.

Armon has a passion for security and distributed systems and their application to real world problems. As a co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, he brings both those interests into the world of DevOps tooling. As a former practitioner and proponent of open source software, he has helped design and implement the HashiCorp products to solve end user problems that he experienced first hand, while applying the state of the art from academic research. He places a high value on research, and leads the HashiCorp Research group, focused on industrial research in the security and large scale system management space.

Bob was an early engineer at Twilio where he is a Senior Architect running engineering-wide initiatives, the architecture engineering team, the architecture and resilience dimensions of the internal operational maturity process, and system consulting and reviews for the 100+ engineering teams. Previously he lead the micro-transaction billing system team and the service discovery / orchestration team. Before Twilio he wrote much of the futures trading engine for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He also founded wigle.net, the largest open database of geolocated wireless networks. He has a Bachelors in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan and 16 patents.

Philip Fung was Facebook's 1st growth engineer and 15th overall engineer. He is co-founder of A3 Foundation, a non-profit to support diversity in media, and Operator.com, an Ai-chat startup which was one of Techcrunch's top 5 finalists for Best New Startup of 2016. He is currently co-founder at Droplet, a women's healthcare technology company.

George is CTO and co-founder of PastureMap, leading product and engineering to create a data analytics platform for ranchers to increase profits while building healthy grasslands. He won the USDA Microsoft Innovation prize for best app using USDA data. Previously, George was a software engineering manager and tech lead at Twitter. He was one of the first iOS developers at Twitter and built and scaled the mobile analytics team. George was a tech lead at Google specializing in data analytics on the iGoogle team. He has a Ph.D. from MIT in Computer Science.

Andrew First is the co-founder and Chief Technologist at Leanplum, where he is responsible for Leanplum’s technical vision and strategy. Andrew helped grow Leanplum to over 200 employees, raise $100M in funding, and process over 20 billion events per day. Prior to Leanplum, Andrew worked as a Software Engineer at Google and generated millions of dollars of revenue for YouTube. Andrew graduated summa cum laude with a BSE from Duke in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science, and was a recipient of Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2017.

Dmitriy is the VP of Software and Data Science at Zymergen, a company that combines software, machine learning, robotics, chemistry, and bioengineering to make useful microbes. Prior to Zymergen, Dmitriy spent many years at Twitter where he created, grew, and managed the data platform and the experimentation tools teams. He has an Master's from CMU in "Very Large Information Systems", which is what they called Big Data back then.

Gautham was a Distinguished Engineer at Google. He led the design and development of four successive generations of Google's query serving infrastructure. During his tenure, he also spent significant time working across other product areas at Google. He graduated with a Masters in Computer Architecture from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Builder of revolutionary software and hardware. Right now it's security, who knows where I'll end up next.

Ty has been working on Android since 2009. He is a Tech Lead Manager at Uber, focused on the frameworks and open-source. He is a member of the Google Developer Expert program and regularly speaks at international conferences on Android. He organizes the SF Android Meetup group and Droidcon SF. Prior to Uber, Ty worked on the Fabric tools at Twitter, the Evernote Android App and SDK, a messaging platform for Sprint, and Zagat for Android.

Tony is the VP Engineering at Dropbox leading the Application Engineering team focusing on customer products like Dropbox Paper, Showcase and the desktop, web and mobile experiences. Prior to Dropbox, Tony was the Head of Engineering for Zendesk - growing and leading a team with development offices in Copenhagen, Singapore, Melbourne, Dublin among others.This was a period of high growth and rapid change from a pre-IPO single product company to a mature public company with a rich product portfolio. He has previously held leadership roles at Box and Yahoo! and earned his developer stripes at Vitria during the early 2000s. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Brown University.

Srinivasan aka Cheenu is currently Senior Director of Search in Apple AI/ML, building novel ways to address and improve Apple user's information access needs. Earlier he was cofounder of Laserlike Inc which built innovative AI based information products for consumers. Laserlike was acquired by Apple in 2018. Prior to that he was a Director at Google Search, running Web Answers, Ranklab ML, A/B testing and logs processing. Earlier he was at Netlogic and Cypress which has acquired his first startup Sahasra. Before that he was at Microsoft Research. He has a B. Tech from IIT Madras and PhD from Washington University St.Louis.

As the Vice President of Engineering at LightStep, Rob is responsible for the engineering organization building the products to observe modern apps with confidence. Previously, Rob built and coached the engineering organizations that launched the Confluent Cloud product at Confluent and developed a large part of the platform technology at Twitter. Before jumping into management, Rob was a Staff Engineer working on hypervisors, operating systems, and compilers. Outside of work, Rob chases his two young kids around San Francisco.

Siva leads software engineering at KeepTruckin. KeepTruckin is a next-gen fleet management platform that aims to connect all the trucks online to disrupt the trillion dollar long-haul transportation industry. Prior to joining KeepTruckin, Siva led consumer relevance eng at Twitter which played a big part in turning around Twitter's user growth. Before joining Twitter, he spent time at Yahoo! Labs and IBM Research pioneering work in machine learning, real-time search, and graph analysis. He holds several publications and patent in ML and was awarded an Edelman Laureate in 2014. Siva earned his Bachelor of Technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, and completed his Masters in Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Ryan is a technical leader who has served as both and engineer and manager. He is constantly seeking ways to help engineering teams execute better by designing the human & technical systems that support good work.

As VP of Operations at Instacart, Sid is focused for scaling the business and responsible for the overall operating and financial performance. He initially joined as the General Manager of SF/Bay Area. Prior to Instacart he was at McKinsey & Company where he advised companies on strategy and operations and worked out of 4 offices around the world. He has a AB in Economics and MBA from Harvard.

Momchil is an expert in mobile app optimization and the CEO and co-founder of LeanPlum. Momchil started his career at Google where he spent 5 years as a software engineer. At Google, he launched multiple quality improvements to YouTube’s ranking algorithms, which resulted in millions of dollars in additional revenue. He also built some of the core A/B testing infrastructure for featured video ads. He has been a speaker at Google I/O, GDC, Mobile Shopping Summit. He has a M.S. in Software Engineering & Management from Carnegie Mellon University.

As Chief architect at Cask Data, which recently joined Google Cloud, Andreas has been developing scalable and big-data software, and has formerly done so at places known for massive scale. He was the lead architect for Hadoop at Yahoo! and also for the foundational content management system that Yahoo! built on Hadoop. Previously, Andreas was a research engineer at Yahoo! and a search architect at IBM. Andreas holds a doctoral degree in computer science for his work on querying XML documents.

Ian Tien is CEO and co-founder of Mattermost, Inc., a high trust, open source Slack-alternative empowering enterprise DevOps and InfoSec teams to increase safety, efficiency, and innovation. He was previously an engineering leader in Microsoft Office, where he earned over a dozen patents. Ian is an alumnus of Waterloo, Cornell and Stanford Business School, where he served as a teaching assistant for Andy Grove and Myron Scholes.

Aneesh is a data scientist and technical lead at Youtube and tech lead of Twitter's recommendations infrastructure. His work on graph algorithms powers relevance for a variety of products at Twitter: who to follow, tweet suggestions in emails, search relevance, instant timeline and home timeline injections. He is also an active network science researcher, and was an Edelman Laureate in 2014. Before joining Twitter, Aneesh received a Ph.D. from Stanford University where he was fortunate to be advised by Rajeev Motwani and Tim Roughgarden.

Recently, Andre and Wisam left Snap with a few friends to start Fingo Inc. and pursue their intersecting passions of fintech and e-commerce. At Snap, they worked alongside Evan Spiegel to scale the company efficiently. They co-founded the Snap San Francisco office and hired roughly 125 top engineers from Google and Facebook. The dual played a major role in driving the controversial app redesign as well as rewriting the Android version of the app; both proved to be critical projects for the future of Snap given the competition. They were also instrumental in rebuilding a word-class data science team to support business, strategy, and product organizations daily. Prior to Snap, both Andre and Wisam spent more than 7 years with Google Search and were part of the Elite Search Quality/Ranking Group that holds Google's secret sauce. During their time at Google, they were responsible for leading major projects used by billions of people everyday. Andre and Wisam have been working together since they joined Google from grad school nearly 11 years ago.

As the VP of Sales at Truework, Cailen oversees the Sales Development, Acquisition, and Customer Success teams. Previously, Cailen was the first sales hire at Box, Dropbox and the first executive hire at Front, where he helped scale revenue from 0 to 100MM+

Professor Jimmy Lin holds the David R. Cheriton Chair in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Lin's research aims to build tools that help users make sense of large amounts of data. His work mostly lies at the intersection of information retrieval and natural language processing, with a focus on data-driven approaches and infrastructure issues. Although most of Lin's work deals with text, he's also worked on relational data, semi-structured data, log data, speech, and graphs. From 2010-2012, Lin spent an extended sabbatical at Twitter, where he worked on services designed to connect users with relevant content and analytics infrastructure to support data science. He currently serves as the Chief Scientist of RSVP.ai, a Waterloo-based startup that aims to build deep natural language understanding technologies to facilitate seamless dialogues between users and systems. Experience in academia and industry guides him in building useful applications that solve real-world user problems while addressing fundamental challenges in computer science and information science. A few years ago, Lin realized that big data wasn't cool anymore, so he switched to deep learning (just like everyone else these days).

Ben Finkel is a serial entrepreneur and technologist. In 2013, Ben and Biz Stone co-founded Jelly Industries—which reimagined search for the next generation of computing platforms, like voice and VR. Jelly was acquired by Pinterest in 2017. During his two years at Pinterest, Ben led the Growth team and launched a new mobile web platform, which is now their biggest source of signups.

Ben’s first company, an early Q&A site called Fluther, was acquired by Twitter in 2010. Ben led the New User Experience team, helping grow Twitter’s active user base from 50 million to more than 200 million.

In his first job, Ben developed algorithms for outer space systems and invented a new technique for locating unexploded bombs at MIT Lincoln Labs.

Gilad is a Principal Manager in Microsoft's Conversational AI team. Previously, he was the Head of Data Science at Color Genomics, a Director of Engineering at Twitter, and a Principal Scientist at Yahoo. His team built Twitter's realtime search technology, serving billions of queries daily to 100M+ users; he also worked on bioinformatics and genomics, anti-spam, user modeling, trend detection, and content discovery. Gilad has a Ph.D in Computer Science from the Univ. of Amsterdam.

Sumbry currently leads Production Engineering @ Uber and his team is responsible for the overall reliability of the Uber Platform. This is a group that builds tools, automates operational processes, and provides production engineering expertise to all of Uber to help improve the reliability of products and infrastructure.

Sumbry has almost two decades of experience working in the platform, infrastructure, and reliability engineering space but comes from a non-traditional background. Having started his career as a software engineer, Sumbry pivoted to network engineering because he wanted to learn more about the core technology that enabled the Internet and other distributed systems.

Sumbry joined several startups afterward as the Internet grew in popularity and quickly learned how to build and scale infrastructure, striving to strike the right balance between perfection and growth. Sumbry eventually started several of his own businesses because he thought he had some good ideas but he also wanted to learn more about problem-solving from a product and customer perspective. Some great (and expensive) lessons were learned here are a big reason why Sumbry is heavily customer focused today even from the infrastructure and reliability side of development.

A random bit of trivia is that Sumbry is an Electronic Music DJ and producer in his free time, as getting away from platforms and infrastructure actually helps preserve his sanity. Well, that was mostly true until computers heavily invaded the music scene eventually as well.

Shadi is senior/executive VP of engineering At Amplitude. She is a passionate, seasoned technology leader and architect experienced in building and managing highly proficient engineering teams. Prior to Amplitude, she was VP of engineering at Palo Alto Networks. She has innovated and delivered several product lines and services specializing in Distributed Systems, Cloud Computing, Big Data, Machine learning and Security. She has a Ph.D. in computer engineering from University of British Columbia and a B.Sc. from Sharif University of Technology. Shadi has published several peer reviewed conference articles and journals as well as several patents.

Sam spent twelve years as Cofounder and Head of Technology at Box, helping build a technology platform that powers 95,000 companies and 70% of the Fortune 500. At Box, Sam was responsible for all major technical and architectural decisions while continually developing and advancing the engineering and company culture. Before Box, Sam attended the University of Southern California for two years while working at two other startups.

Milun started entrepreneurship at a young age with metrolyrics.com which grew to 60 million monthly unique visitors before being sold to CBS Interactive. While at CBS he oversaw multiple teams and products while simultaneously investing in other entrepreneurs and companies. After CBS, Milun joined Expa as a Partner to build new companies including CMD (processing more than 1B commands per month) and Gitalytics (Acquired by GitHub/Microsoft). He has a deep passion for technical problems and creating better engineers.

Matt Klein is a software engineer at Lyft and the creator of Envoy. He has been working on operating systems, virtualization, distributed systems, networking, and making systems easy to operate for nearly 20 years across a variety of companies. Some highlights include leading the development of Twitter’s L7 edge proxy and working on high-performance computing and networking in Amazon’s EC2.

After working on the original iPhone at Apple, Loren sold his business to Twitter so they could release their first mobile app. He has patents spanning the design and implementation of a number of notable UI patterns (including the infamous “pull to refresh”). Today he consults companies specializing in education technology and is pursuing ideas in in sustainable architecture.

As Senior Staff Engineer at Twitter, Lien leads the consumer video client team that builds rich media experiences across Twitter's android, iOS, and web clients. Lien joined Twitter in 2011 to work on its Android app right when the phrase "mobile first" was getting popular. She's held numerous tech lead roles working at Twitter and in 2017, she formally moved into an engineering leadership role. Lien has experience in consumer products, mobile, and engineering leadership.

Josh is the VP Product at Robinhood, helping the team build powerful tools to broaden access to our financial system and a venture partner at Greylock. Josh specializes in designing, building, and scaling consumer products, having been part of multiple companies that have grown to more than 100 million users. Josh spent 15 years in product and engineering roles at leading companies in social, commerce, and media. Josh was the product lead for growth and relevance at Twitter, growing Twitter’s active user base by nearly 10x. Prior to Twitter, Josh worked on the platform at Facebook and led the launch of Facebook Connect. Josh was an early employee at LinkedIn and helped establish early models for user growth and launched v1 of LinkedIn Jobs.

In addition, he is a Venture Partner at Greylock Partners where he represents Greylock on the board of Medium, Discord, and Mammoth Media. He also led investments in SmartThings (acquired by Samsung in 2014), Musical.ly (acquired by Toutiao in 2017), and Houseparty (acquired by Epic Games in 2019).

Josh holds a BS in Symbolic Systems with a focus on Human Computer Interaction from Stanford University.

Jon is a product-oriented leader who always tries to leave things better than he finds them. He is a member of Pinterest’s senior leadership team and is responsible for the technical oversight and strategy behind Pinterest’s iOS and Android applications, websites, and API service. He started his career building video games at Electronic Arts and then entered the consumer internet world in 2010, where he has been leading engineers ever since.

Krishna Gade is an Entrepreneur and Engineering Leader with a strong technical experience of creating scalable platforms and delightful consumer products. He is currently the Founder, CEO of Fiddler Labs, an enterprise startup building an Explainable AI Engine to address problems w.r.t Bias, Fairness and Transparency in AI. Previously he held senior engineering leadership roles at Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Microsoft.

Raghavendra Prabhu (RVP) is Chief Technology Officer at Thumbtack. In this role, he leads a team of close to 200 comprised of engineering, data science, business applications and IT. In his time at Thumbtack, he has overseen development of Thumbtack's Instant Match technology, which instantly matches millions of customers with the right pro to get their job done across hundreds of categories. Prior to Thumbtack, he held leadership roles and worked on consumer scale search and technical infrastructure problems at Pinterest, Twitter, Google and Microsoft.

Mo is an product-centric, technologist, entrepreneur and operator. He advises for various Private Equity and late stage Venture firms. During his career he has put together teams that have build out and taken to market: customer service software utilizing deep learning for speech processing; Java and container-based Cloud application platforms; converged infrastructure; and stream processing software for algorithmic trading. Mo has a Doctoral degree in distributed data processing from Cambridge University.

After 10 years leading Strategy & Analytics groups that specialized in Marketing optimization, I turned my attention to Marketing full time. My core expertise is using data and technology to drive efficient customer acquisition and increase customer lifetime value. I invest in building strong brands to create a halo that accelerates performance marketing results.