About

Nikhil Saxena is a seasoned Head of Engineering with over 11 years of relevant experience in the field. Currently, he is serving as the Head of Engineering, Risk Intelligence at Stripe, where he leads a team responsible for building strategic ML models that enable Stripe's business. Nikhil and his team use deep learning and sophisticated modeling to reduce fraud, credit, and supportability risk, and they build the underlying machine learning infra that powers all of Stripe ML. Nikhil is also actively hiring both engineering managers and engineers for his team. Prior to joining Stripe, Nikhil served as the Senior Engineering Manager at Yelp, where he led the Trust and Safety Engineering and ML Platform Engineering teams. In Trust and Safety, Nikhil led an organization of 25 ML engineers and engineering managers split across three teams: Spam and Abuse Detection, Financial Fraud, and Scrapers and Click Fraud. He regularly reported results to the CEO, liaised with lawyers and PR, made product recommendations to reduce abuse, and represented Yelp at industry conferences on Trust & Safety. In ML Platform, he founded and led an organization of 30 ML and infra engineers and engineering managers across four teams in SF and London - building central ML and compute infra for all of Yelp. Nikhil's prior experience also includes serving as an Engineering Manager at Yelp, where he led Yelp's Spam and Abuse Detection team. He led a team of 15 ML engineers focused on detecting fake reviews, online abuse, and user misbehavior. Nikhil launched multiple models to catch fraudulent reviews, exported trust signals used throughout Yelp, and built the central services that detected abuse across all 50+ content and activity streams. Nikhil holds a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree from Duke University, where he dual majored in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Biomedical Engineering (BME). He has a strong technical background in Senior Software Engineering, ML, infra, Deep Learning, and Search. Nikhil is a highly skilled professional with a proven track record of delivering results and building successful teams.