About

Sam Mahdad is a highly accomplished Senior Lead Software Engineer with over 5 years of experience in the technology industry. He is currently working at Amazon, where he is responsible for leading multiple teams and overseeing the development of complex software solutions that leverage machine learning, big data, and other cutting-edge technologies. Sam's impressive track record at Amazon includes serving as the tech lead across 4 teams to build Amazon Advertising's ability to produce online measurement of machine learned models for completely unrecognized traffic. He architected the solution which allows teams to see the actual impact their models would have on traffic and presented the solution to Amazon's engineering leadership via a formal org-wide design review. He also led a team of 7 engineers to allow frequency capping on unrecognized traffic via machine learned models, and architected a scalable solution to handle ~100k reads per second and ~80k writes per second. In addition to his technical expertise, Sam is also a skilled mentor and team leader. He was a founding member of the modeled frequency capping team, where he built a culture of technical/personal growth, individual ownership, and team collaboration. He achieved this through tech demos, book clubs, shared cooking recipes, and joint working sessions. Under his leadership, the team grew from only 2 engineers to now 10 engineers, 2 applied scientists, and 3 applied scientists on loan. Sam's past experience includes working as a Software Engineer Intern at a9.com, where he worked on the Advertising department under Inventory Forecasting Systems. He also served as an Industrial Relations Officer at Upsilon Pi Epsilon Nu Chapter, where he connected University Recruiters with UC Berkeley Computer Science students for full-time and internship positions. Sam holds a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley and an Associate of Science (A.S.) in Mathematics from Orange Coast College. His technical skills include Java, ML, Spark, Python, Redis, Data Scientist, Postgres, Big Data, and Spring.