About

Nicola Bortignon is a highly experienced Director of Engineering at Meta, with a focus on ML/AI/Security. With over 15 years of experience in scaled machine learning systems for consumer products, Nicola has built teams and organizations around recommendation systems, search, targeting, behavioral understanding, behavioral nudging, content detection, and security. Currently, Nicola is leading the 300+ Engineering organization at Meta, focused on developing advanced ML techniques to protect the community across EMEA and NORAM. His scope includes account management across the family of products, detection systems for securing accounts, detecting violating behaviors and interactions, detecting scripted and scaled behavior, Ads integrity, business account integrity and safety, recovery and reporting products, and privacy compliant account data collection. Additionally, he is supporting the growth of the META ML and AI engineering community in EMEA. In his past roles, Nicola was the Director of Engineering at Spotify, where he led teams focused on advanced Analytics and ML with application on location and context inference, user journey modeling and optimization, company-wide data ontologies and semantic, real-time model training, on-device inference, and federated training. He was also the Head of Recommendations, Classification, Content, and User Intelligence at SoundCloud, where he led machine learning and analytics teams focused on recommendation systems, classification (MIR), content, and user intelligence, and audio fingerprinting. Nicola holds a Stanford Innovation and Entrepreneurship Certificate from Stanford University, a Master's Degree in Machine Learning for Multimedia Information Retrieval from Leiden University, and a Master's Degree in Artificial Intelligence from the Università degli Studi di Padova. He also holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Software Engineering from the same university. Nicola is a Senior Software Engineer with expertise in ML, AI, recommendation systems, decentralization, infrastructure, search, and mobile. In his free time, he is designing an open standard for high power consumption load management to facilitate energy optimization across the residential space and accelerate the transition to a decentralized energy grid. Nicola is currently hiring for senior engineer managers, staff/senior ML engineers, staff/senior data engineers, staff/senior applied researchers, and staff/senior system engineers in London.