About

Swaminathan Padmanabhan is a highly accomplished Data Scientist with over 15 years of experience in the industry. Currently, he serves as the Vice President for Data Science at Freshworks Inc., where he leads a team of engineers and data scientists focused on building machine learning capabilities for CRM and customer engagement. He is responsible for driving innovation and introducing ML-based features as part of the Freshworks business software suite, which includes products for marketing, sales, support, and customer success. Prior to joining Freshworks, Swami was heading the Data Science function at Olacabs, Bangalore. Here, he built a team of over 30 data scientists and research engineers who worked on building intelligent systems for the taxi marketplace leveraging machine learning, optimization, signal analysis, and statistics. His team's charter was threefold; to deepen their understanding of the customer, to model driver performance/behavior, and to optimize Ola's marketplace levers such as pricing and driver matching, in order to achieve certain pre-stated business objectives given a constrained operating environment. Some of the initiatives taken up by his team include surge pricing, driver-customer matching to minimize ride cancellations, customer/driver risk scores, route profiling, predicting on-road customer pickup (and drop) points, fraud detection, demand forecasting, incentive schemes for drivers, home/work location identification, categorizing locations (as transit points, malls, offices, etc.), rideshare modeling, modeling customer sensitivities to surge pricing, category affinities, ETA prediction, and marketplace simulation models. Swami is an alumnus of IIT Madras, where he completed his Master of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering. He also holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Anna University. His experience spans multiple industries, including ad-tech, retail, fleet logistics, and SaaS. Swami is a seasoned data scientist with a strong background in machine learning and research. His technical skills include data science, machine learning, and research scientist. He is a highly motivated individual with excellent leadership skills, and his passion for data science and machine learning is evident in his work.