Bio
Navneet Rao is a senior engineering manager at Thumbtack, a late-stage Sequoia backed consumer facing marketplace for local services. His org is responsible for matching customers on Thumbtack to professionals & local businesses in their neighborhood using data science & machine learning. They work on challenges in areas like search, ranking & marketplace efficiency. Before Thumbtack, he was a tech lead for the conversational AI team at Watson Assistant, IBM’s largest AI product. He focused on machine learning challenges like language understanding, intent & entity detection, transfer learning & machine bias detection. He also holds several patents in this space. He is an alumni of the Language Technologies Institute (LTI), at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
