Navneet Rao
Director of Engineering at Thumbtack
- Role
- Director of Engineering at Thumbtack
- Location
- San Francisco, CA, US
- LinkedIn followers
- 500 followers
About Navneet Rao
Navneet Rao is a Director of Engineering at Thumbtack. He owns engineering strategy and execution for Thumbtack’s core marketplace platform, driving double-digit revenue growth across a multi-billion dollar platform serving 4M customers and 300K professionals. He\'s also a frequent conference speaker and author on engineering leadership and AI strategy.Navneet has built and scaled a 30+ engineer organization across search, ranking, recommendations, and supply efficiency, developing 3 engineering managers and establishing an experimentation-driven engineering culture running 50+ experiments annually. He has experience defining and driving a company-wide generative AI strategy, influencing senior leadership decisions and enabling adoption across multiple product areas. Having delivered consistent ML-driven marketplace growth across multiple roles, he has experience driving massive business growth for a multi-billion dollar tech company.Prior to his marketplace leadership role at Thumbtack, Navneet worked as a machine learning engineer, solving various consumer-facing and cloud-scale challenges. As a tech lead at Thumbtack, he significantly improved search ranking and machine learning infrastructure. At IBM, he served as a tech lead, where he developed and launched machine learning capabilities for Watson Assistant, IBM\'s conversational AI platform. Watson Assistant, a cloud-scale service, was deployed globally for over 100M users supporting 10+ languages (with over ML models in production). Navneet holds several patents for innovations in machine learning & AI, and is an alumnus of the Language Technologies Institute (LTI), at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.
Experience
Director of Engineering
Mar 2024 — Present · San Francisco, CA, US
Owns engineering strategy and execution for Thumbtack’s core marketplace platform, driving double-digit revenue growth across a multi-billion dollar platform serving 4M customers and 300K professionals.• Built and scaled a 30+ engineer organization across search, ranking, recommendations, and supply efficiency, developing 3 engineering managers and establishing an experimentation-driven engineering culture running 50+ experiments annually.• Experience defining and driving a company-wide generative AI strategy, influencing senior leadership decisions and enabling adoption across multiple product areas. • Delivered consistent ML-driven marketplace growth across multiple roles for a multi-billion dollar tech company:+7% revenue (2021),+8% revenue (2022-23), double-digit growth (2024-25).
Education
Savitribai Phule Pune University
Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Computer Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Master of Science - MS, Intelligent Information Systems
Skills
- Machine Learning
- Algorithms
- Data Mining
- Amazon Web Services (Aws)
- Mapreduce
- Java
- C
- Mysql
- Cassandra
- Public Speaking
- Data Structures
- Computer Science
- Hadoop
- Eclipse
- Python
- Microservices
- Natural Language Processing
- Information Retrieval
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