About

Vishnu S. is an experienced Engineering Manager at Yelp, where he manages the User Modelling Machine Learning team. His background is in ML for robotics, but during his time at Yelp, he has mostly worked on Ad Tech. Vishnu has worked on several technologies, including Ad creative optimisations with bandits and NLP, Autobidding, Ad targeting optimisations, and Store visit detection. He has even had a brief foray into causal inference for understanding advertiser churn. Vishnu's expertise in ML has helped him to optimize ad targeting and user segmentation, as well as to develop Store Visit Detection models. Before his current role, Vishnu worked as a Machine Learning Engineer (Tech Lead) at Yelp, where he was one of the two tech leads in the Sales Intelligence team under the Applied Machine Learning organization. He helped bootstrap an ML team in London and provided mentorship, project and people management. Additionally, he consulted on projects that focused on causal inference to understand advertiser churn. Vishnu also worked as a Machine Learning Engineer at Yelp, where he worked on understanding the need for further ML in ad creative optimizations. His analyses and recommendations resulted in the restructuring of the team with an increased focus on front-end optimizations instead of ML explorations. He also worked on store visit attribution improvements. Vishnu has a Master of Science in Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied Robotics. He also has a Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering from NIT Tiruchirappalli. Vishnu has also completed several courses at Stanford University, including CS228: Probabilistic Graphical Models and Computer Science. Vishnu's tech stack includes Senior Software Engineer, ML, NLP, and Frontend. With 3.27 years of relevant experience, Vishnu is a skilled Engineering Manager who is passionate about using ML to optimize ad targeting and user segmentation. He is a team player who is always willing to provide mentorship and project management to his team members.