People
The specialized team driving our AI technolgy
mercari
ML Engineer
Yilin LI
Yilin is a ML Engineer at Mercari Japan and is a member of the Marketing Data Science Team. Her background is in applying modeling, mathematical optimization, and other techniques to marketing strategies. she has experience in designing solutions to improve profit by integrating ML and mathematical optimization, as well as analyzing user behavior to improve user engagement through personalized communication.
ML Engineer
Ankur Abhinav
Ankur joined Mercari in October 2019 as a software/ML engineer. He has worked on developing both ML models and the backend systems required to deploy them. Ankur has also worked on analyzing and improving the effects of Online Experiments in the marketing domain.
Software Engineer
Shaopeng Dai
Shaopeng joined Mercari in 2019 as a new graduate. Initially a member of the Image Search Team, he is now a member of the Listing Quality ML Team, which aims to leverage ML to deliver a better listing experience to Mercari’s users. Shaopeng and his team employ ML suggestions to assist users in listing items. Additionally, he has experience in ML system development, modeling, and model evaluation based on user behavior analysis.
ML Engineer
Abhijeet Bhure
Abhijeet joined Mercari as a new graduate in 2019 and is currently working as a ML engineer on the Data Science Backend Team—a team with a unique intersection of responsibilities. While Abhijeet and his team provide data science support to backend teams to help them develop better personalized services, they also provide backend support to ML teams, assisting them in the development, deployment and maintenance of the services that support their ML models. Through this work, Abhijeet has developed a diverse skill set in ML as well as backend development. Abhijeet is also the scrum master of the team.
ML Engineer
Paul Willot
Paul joined Mercari in 2021 as a Deep Learning specialist. He has experience with the entire ML stack—from modeling and handling large data sets to runtime optimization and cluster deployment—which he leverages to bridge the gap between research and production. Before coming to Mercari, Paul worked in fintech making real-time forecasting models at scale, and also consulted for major Japanese companies.
Engineering Manager
Kumar Abhinav
Kumar joined Mercari as a new graduate in 2018. He started out as a ML engineer on the Image Search Team and then moved to the Data Science Backend Team where he is currently working as an Engineering Manager & Tech Lead. Kumar’s team focuses on providing a personalized experience to Mercari’s users through ML along with developing backend solutions to scale the use of data science. In addition to his interests in ML and backend development, Kumar also enjoys formulating efficient, agile processes within the engineering teams.
Software Engineer
Akihiro Shimizu
Akihiro joined Mercari in 2018 as a ML engineer and, as tech lead, is responsible for optimizing the cost-benefit of coupon marketing. He is currently a member of the Trust and Safety Team, where he is in charge of projects to improve safety and security on the Mercari app. Akihiro has experience leading product management at several startups, and he also specializes in comprehensive product development that includes everything from project design to implementation and evaluation.
ML Engineer
Deddy Jobson
Deddy is a ML engineer who joined Mercari as a new graduate. He is responsible for analyzing marketing campaigns using statistical models and mathematical optimization. On top of predicting which users respond positively or negatively to campaigns, Deddy also provides detailed explanations for those behaviors. He then shares those insights with stakeholders to discuss ways to improve future campaigns.
Software Engineer
Mohit Pokharna
Mohit is a software engineer and data scientist with experience in building ML systems and improving Mercari’s experimentation practices within Mercari. He is currently working as a search engineer, scaling Mercari’s search features and improving search efficiency. Prior to that, Mohit worked on projects related to pricing and influencing user pricing behavior. He was a core member of the team responsible for building the multi-armed bandit system for pricing.
Engineering Manager
Adam Malowiecki
Adam is an Engineering Manager working on the Mercari ML platform. He has had experience at startups in Australia as a Data Engineer and ML consultant mostly in the finance and legal sectors. He is interested in Machine Learning operations and cloud infrastructure. His goal is to create a best practice ML operations team and world-class ML platform.
EdgeAI Engineer
Chica Matsueda
Chica has worked as a game programmer and AI development consultant before joining Mercari. She has experience working as an MLOps Engineer for AI services, and currently works on EdgeAI technology to bring AI working on low-spec devices such as smartphones.
Director of Search, Discovery and Product metadata
David Cournapeau
Cournapeau has a background in Machine Learning, with a PhD in the domain of speech recognition. He has more than 15 years of experience working at the interface of software engineering and science. In the last 4 to 5 years, he moved into a leadership role to help organizations improve their products through data and Machine Learning.
He used to be a core contributor to NumPy and SciPy, and was a regular speaker to python conferences, including as a keynote speaker in PyCon Colombia and PyCon Thailand.
ML Engineer
Jie Yang
Jie joined Mercari as a ML Engineer in 2019. Her work is to support marketing strategies by Machine Learning to meet customer satisfaction and make marketing efforts efficient. Currently she is working on optimizing coupon distribution strategies by applying uplift modeling. Her research domain was computer vision at her master stage and she published papers on CVPR and ICCV. Check out her google scholar page here.
Engineering Manager
Kazuaki Hiraga
Kazuaki has been working on the enterprise search platform, search engines, and Natural Language Processing libraries. Currently he works as an Engineering Manager for the Search feature team to improve search quality and user experience. He also works on the Lucene related open source projects.
Engineering Manager
Keisuke Umezawa
Keisuke is a Software and ML Engineer with experience in financial modeling and recommendation engine development at web companies and Fintech startups. He is currently involved in multiple teams as an Engineering Manager. He is and was also involved in the development of OSS for deep learning frameworks and hyperparameter optimization, and as an evangelist, he strives to popularize the libraries.
Engineering Manager
Kenta SHIMADA
Kenta joined Mercari in September 2018 as a Tech Lead for the Backend teams and currently Engineering Manager at Customer Reliability Engineering Camp. At the team, he is managing a feature team where Backend and ML Engineers belong. Before Mercari, he worked as a full stack engineer in the US and Japan for more than 10 years.
Engineering Manager
Pablo Bordons Estrada
Pablo is a Data Scientist and Engineering Manager in the ML Price Team, currently focusing on helping our users to successfully sell their items in Mercari. Other than price he has worked around data related topics and features such as Image Search. Before joining Mercari he was working as a Deep Learning Researcher in the field of edge AI, where he investigated quantization, compression, and other techniques in order to bring computer vision models into FPGAs. Before that he worked in the gaming industry as a Data Scientist, focusing on behavioral analysis, monetization, and data design.
He is first and foremost passionate about data: from behavioral analysis to online experimentation and optimization, going through all steps in the data generation process such as schema definition.Search engineer
Shi Qian
QIAN is a Software and ML Engineer in Mercari search team. He mainly focuses on search quality evaluation, search relevancy improvement and query intent understanding. As a ML Engineer, he uses different ML algorithms (GBDT, BERT, and etc.) to model user behaviors and seek possibilities of improving search quality. Basically he is working on all tasks of the search A/B experiment pipeline: Modeling -> Implementation -> AB test -> Data analysis and judge -> Release.
VP of Platform Engineering
Shunya Kimura
Shunya has extensive experience developing recommendation engines and graph mining engines in a social platform, as well as adtech and marketing data development using natural language processing. Since 2017, he has been the Director in areas around Artificial Intelligence and Search Engines at Mercari.
ML Engineer
Shunya Ueta
Shunya joined Mercari as a ML Engineer in February 2018. His first work is to improve the existing Machine Learning based content moderation system. This project result was accepted by OpML’20. Currently, He is working on optimizing ranking logic to improve the search experience for customers. He privately organizes the MLOps community which mainly discusses how to apply Machine Learning in the real world.
Engineering Manager
Takeshi Matsumoto
Data Science Specialist with over 20 years experience in making business strategy, developing a machine learning algorithm from large data sets. Clarify customer decision-making mechanisms and insights using advanced statistical models and formulate new marketing strategies.
Software Engineer
Tomohiro Furusawa
Tomohiro has worked at a human resources company as a data scientist, and tackled on scale-up of existing services and establishing new business at the company, then he has been engaging in product development for Information Retrieval and Recommender Systems. He joined Mercari in 2019 and has worked on information access evaluation. After that, he started a recommendation team as a PM, and is now promoting R&D in the team as a Scrum Master and Software Engineer.
Engineering Manager
Yuji Oshima
Yuji joined Mercari in July 2019 as a SysML Engineer and he is currently a Tech Lead at EdgeAI team. In the team, he leads the development of features that perform Machine Learning inference on mobile apps and browsers. Before joining Mercari, he focused on OSS development, where he developed Docker and launched and led the development of KubeFlow/Katib.
ML Engineer / Backend Engineer
Yusuke Shido
Since joining in 2019 Yusuke has been working on a Machine Learning model and backend development in the Customer Reliability Engineering field, such as violation detection systems. Since then he now handles data analysis and implementation for a team that finds tasks and develops solutions in quick iterations. He has been part of a research and development startup while still in school, and is good at coming up with solutions for difficult problems and tasks.
