About

Puru Anand is a highly skilled and passionate Master of Computer Science student at the University of California, Irvine, with over four years of experience as a software engineer at Samsung R&D. He has a strong desire to solve problems and make the world a better place using technology. Puru's recent experience includes working at Google as a Software Engineering Intern for the Summer 2022 term, where he was part of the Ads Forecasting team in Google Ads. He provided performance forecasts for video ad campaigns to over 4 million advertisers, and created the entire backend of a new type of ad campaigns called Target Frequency in the Google Ads Reach Planner tool. Puru also made changes to the team's validation dashboard to run daily validations for this new ad type, built a quality tool using Colab to measure the success metric defined for Target Frequency ad campaigns, modified the code of the underlying model used for forecasting to add support of these new ad campaigns, and ran A/B tests to compare quality, increasing the accuracy of forecast predictions by 86%. Out of 40+ interns, Puru was one of 10 selected to showcase his project to the overall YouTube Ads team lead. Puru's past experience includes working as a Software Engineer at Samsung, where he was responsible for the development and maintenance of the search engine in Samsung Smart TVs around the world. He also worked on Deep Media Search, the first of a kind NLP solution in any Smart TV Search service, and was the owner of SearchAll Business Console, an intra-team portal. Puru developed CI/CD Jenkins pipelines and Ansible playbooks for effortless deployment to Windows servers via Git, and developed a pilot project as a part of an intra-company hackathon which improved UX while watching TV in the domain of subtitles. He also worked as a Web Developer at Medhalt, where he developed a platform for patients and hospitals to exchange messages and created an editor for content writers to develop new pages without having prior web development knowledge. Puru's education history includes a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine, and a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Engineering from NSIT. He also attended Delhi Public School for high school. Puru's tech stack includes Search, AI, Backend, ML, SQL, Javascript, NodeJS, Elastic Search, AWS, Mobile, BERT, Web, Ansible, NLP, CI/CD, test, Jenkins, PHP, Frontend, and Python. With 4.18