About

Ashok Pancily Poothiyot is an accomplished product and technology leader with over 11 years of experience in the industry. He is currently leading the Personalization and Advanced Technology Group teams at Pinterest, where he is responsible for powering personalization, ranking/relevance, knowledge graph, and UX personalization across various platforms such as Search, Ads, Feed, Notifications, and Shopping. Prior to joining Pinterest, Ashok worked at Facebook (Meta) as a Product Lead, where he led teams and products that drove ranking, relevance, and personalization initiatives across Instagram for over a billion active users using machine learning. He managed various areas such as Personalization, Private Sharing, Avatars Relevance, and Shopping Relevance, enabling users to express themselves in unique ways and discover the products they love. Ashok is an entrepreneur at heart and a builder of products by calling. He is passionate about driving strategic direction and moving a product or product family into a market leadership position. He has a strong background in product management, machine learning, human-centered design, software engineering, and data science. Ashok holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), where he was among the top of his class. He also has a Master of Science degree in Computer Science with a Machine Learning specialization from the Georgia Institute of Technology and pursued graduate coursework in Machine Learning at Stanford University. He furthered his education by earning a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree in Strategy, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation from Yale University as a Harvey Scholar. Ashok's technical expertise includes ML, Search, product management, and data science. He has experience in shipping large-scale services, conducting market analysis, and developing successful product development processes. With his impressive skill set and extensive experience, Ashok is a valuable asset to any organization looking to drive innovation and achieve market leadership.