About

Arden Dertat is a highly experienced machine learning engineer with over 10 years of relevant experience. He is currently working as a Senior Research Engineer at Netflix, where he is involved in solving complex machine learning problems related to recommendations, promotions, and growth. Prior to this, Arden was one of the founding members of the Pinterest Monetization team, where he served as a Senior Software Engineer and Tech Lead of Ads Selection and Relevance areas. During his tenure at Pinterest, Arden designed and implemented a query expansion service for search ads, built the first deep learning model in the ads team, and rewrote ads indexing and selection. He also developed machine learning models to calculate query to ad relevance and filtered out irrelevant ads, added new features to the click prediction model, and improved the accuracy of the user to ad relevance model. Arden's overall contribution to the company was in the order of $50M, 20% engagement gain, and 60% relevance gain. Before joining Pinterest, Arden worked as a Software Development Engineer 2 at Microsoft, where he enriched ads with new annotations to improve click yield and developed machine learning models to rank candidate ads for a given query real-time in production. He also improved Bing's relevance metric by more than 8% with less than 0.5% revenue loss. Arden holds an MSc in Computer Science from Brown University, where he completed his degree in 2012. He also completed a Visiting Student program in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011. Arden earned his BSc in Computer Science from Boğaziçi Üniversitesi in 2010 and completed his High School education in Math and Science from Kadikoy Anatolian High School in 2006. Arden is proficient in several technologies, including Research Scientist, ML, Search, Deep Learning, Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer, Keras, and Tensorflow. He is also known for his expertise in programming interview questions, and he regularly shares his knowledge on his blog. Arden is also passionate about teaching and has created a deep learning tutorial series on Medium and a search engine implementation tutorial on his blog.