About me

I’m an engineering leader with over a decade of experience in Growth and Machine Learning and a proven track record of driving user and business growth in social and e-commerce platforms (Whatnot, Snap, Amazon, eBay). I’ve led business-critical products spanning user acquisition (performance marketing, SEO & SEM, referrals, sharing, etc), activation (onboarding & education, authentication), and retention (friend search and recommendation systems, push notifications & SMS, promotion, and risk management).

Currently at Whatnot, I lead Buyer Growth, driving user acquisition, activation, and onboarding to help new users discover their “magic moment” so they return, engage, and become loyal customers. Our mission is to enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce.

Prior to Whatnot, I was at Snap leading the Friending Product team, Growth Machine Learning team, Growth Foundation & Data team, and Graph Understanding Platform. We develop features to enhance the Friending experience, deliver ML solutions and infrastructure to power various growth products (e.g., friend recommendations, notification optimization, search, invite, and off-platform sharing), and build a new Graph Understanding Platform to mine signals from complex entity relationships on Snapchat, unlocking new business opportunities. Before Snap, I was a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon working on promotion forecasting and seller recommendations, and earlier an Applied Researcher at eBay focusing on search engine marketing across Google and Facebook, as well as fraud and risk systems. Details of my experience available here.

I am passionate about education and helping more people enter the field of machine learning and data science. From 2018 to 2024, I taught graduate-level ML courses—including Advanced ML, Deep Learning, and NLP—at the Foster School of Business, University of Washington.

I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Oregon State University under Dr. Weng-Keen Wong. My research focused on probabilistic graphical models and crowdsourced data, including work with the eBird project to model species distribution and quantify user skill levels. See my publications here.