About

Mariano Semelman is a highly skilled computer scientist with over 10 years of experience in machine learning, Python, AWS, MLOps, and big data tools such as Apache Spark and Trino/Presto/AWS Athena. He is currently the Head of Data Science Platform at Veriff, where he leads, hires, and develops teams of Applied Data Scientists. Mariano is passionate about real-world applications of machine learning and balances short and long-term planning to translate business and product needs into technical roadmaps. He fosters enthusiasm, curiosity, and pragmatism in those around him. At Veriff, Mariano is responsible for the Fraud and Data Science Platform areas and leads four teams of 15+ people working across different locations. He implements reusable systems, processes, and tools to scale Data Science teams across the organization, plans and drives the anti-fraud strategy for clients around the world, and fosters a healthy tech culture in the Barcelona hub as the most senior Engineering team member in Barcelona. Prior to his current role, Mariano was the Head of Data Science at OLX, where he led a team of 10 people working on information retrieval, personalization, and CLM for nine different marketplaces. He co-owned the Data Science product roadmap for teams working in the area of personalization and relevance and was in charge of the ML development lifecycle. Mariano implemented several personalization services using ML algorithms and big data to improve site personalization and achieved significant results, such as a +10% increase in conversions per user overall and a 20% increase in conversions across six of the marketplaces. Mariano holds a Master's Degree in Computer Science from the University of Buenos Aires and has a wealth of experience in relevant technologies such as Apache Airflow, Spark, Sagemaker, Databricks, New Relic, Kubernetes, Python, Cassandra, Kafka, and more. He is a research scientist and expert in information retrieval, search, P2P, and ML, with relevant experience of 9.52 years.