About

Mandar Rahurkar is a seasoned Senior Director of Machine Learning at Sharechat, with over 14 years of relevant experience in the field. He is an expert in deriving actionable insights from large, heterogeneous, and noisy datasets. Mandar is comfortable working with domain experts on early versions of the problems when the problem lacks definition and working to carve the right solution to meet the needs of the user. Mandar's technical expertise includes machine learning/predictive modeling, scalable algorithms for large-scale data, text mining and understanding, Hadoop and its ecosystem, and Spark and its ecosystem. He is well-versed in using GCP and infra and has worked as a Software Engineer and Senior Software Engineer in his career. Mandar has a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a Master of Science in ECE, Speech Signal Processing from the University of Colorado Boulder. He also holds a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Mumbai. Mandar's past work experience includes working as a Staff Software Engineer at Nextdoor, where he built sentiment detectors to capture sentiment on user comments, built Inventory Forecasting and Allocation pipelines, and identified and built ML-based solutions to improve community health on the platform. He also worked as a Senior Data Scientist at Yahoo, where he worked on large data problems and built Yahoo's next-generation large-scale knowledge graph. Mandar is a skilled problem solver and mentor, with a focus on scaling product features. He has a passion for working on large-scale data problems and getting things done. He is open to connecting with professionals in the industry and can be reached at rahurkar@gmail.com.