Navneet Rao

I'm Navneet, Director of Engineering at Thumbtack, where I lead the teams behind search, ranking, and recommendations across a marketplace connecting 4 million customers with 300,000 professionals. My 30+ engineer org runs dozens of experiments annually, from semantic search to LLM-powered experiences.

Before Thumbtack, I was a tech lead at IBM Watson, building machine learning systems for Watson Assistant, deployed globally to 100M+ users. I hold patents in ML and AI and studied at Carnegie Mellon's Language Technologies Institute.

Ask me about scaling ML organizations, building experimentation cultures, generative AI strategy, and search and ranking systems.