Akash Bharadwaj

About Akash Bharadwaj

I’m a Senior Staff Software Engineer in Meta’s Super Intelligence Lab. Broadly, my…

Experience

1. Staff Software Engineer

   Meta

   Feb 2023 — Present

   I am a technical lead at Meta within the Ads org. Since Jan 2023, I am responsible for leading efforts to build an Automated Ads product (Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns) that can succinctly be described as \"self-driving ads\". In a nutshell, advertisers no longer need to fuss over fine grained targeting parameters, optimal campaign structure and budget allocation, creative selection etc. by simply leaving everything to our sophisticated ML systems which leverage Meta\'s large user base and increased liquidity in our Ads ecosystem to drive improvements in return on ads spend for advertisers. Prior to my joining, this product launched and achieved a $x Billion run rate within a year. Prior to that, I led efforts over 2.5 years to develop Federated Learning, Differential Privacy and Multi-Party Computation at Meta. These technologies allow us to train state-of-the-art machine learning models at Facebook scale in a distributed fashion using highly decentralized data that never leaves user devices. This enables us to provide rigorous privacy and security guarantees to users, ingest useful data we might otherwise be unable to access, and defend against existential risks such as regulations without compromising on model quality. This work has directly driven ~$y Billion in revenue for Meta, by modernizing our Ads business to cope with signal loss (eg. due to privacy regulations, iOS platform restrictions etc), increase user trust in our products, and improve the quality and relevance of our AI/ML systems to billions of our users. It has additionally found applications across our family of apps (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram) and in AR/VR devices. My responsibilities span individual R&D contributions (research papers and production code), product strategy and ownership, team building, mentorship of engineers and research scientists, as well as advising on technological solutions to policy and regulatory headwinds to the business (eg. privacy, security, fairness etc.).

Skills

• C
• Machine Learning
• Java
• Data Structures
• Algorithms
• Python
• Scalability
• Computer Science
• Natural Language Processing
• Matlab
• Data Mining
• Predictive Analytics