Navneet Rao
Director of Engineering at Thumbtack leading teams responsible for search, ranking, recommendations, and supply efficiency across a multi-billion-dollar marketplace serving more than 4 million customers and 300,000 professionals.
Engineering and AI Leader · Thumbtack · San Francisco
NAVNEET RAO
Shaping engineering strategy and execution for AI-powered products serving millions of customers.
Technology Leadership
AI Strategy
Marketplaces
Machine Learning
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About
Engineering leadership
Engineering leader focused on building ML-driven systems and the organizations that scale them.
My career has centered on building intelligent systems across large-scale consumer and enterprise platforms.
At Thumbtack, I’ve built and scaled a 30+ engineer organization spanning machine learning and product engineering.
I regularly write and speak about AI strategy, machine learning platforms, and engineering leadership.
I hold multiple patents in machine learning and artificial intelligence and am an alumnus of the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science.
Technology LeadershipAI StrategyMarketplacesMachine learning
Education
Pittsburgh, PA
Carnegie Mellon University
Master of Science
Intelligent Information Systems (Focus: Machine Learning & NLP)
Leadership & Management
RoadmappingTechnology StrategyProduct StrategyAI StrategyOrganizational DesignCross-Functional CollaborationExecutive CommunicationHiring & Managing ManagersCareer DevelopmentPerformance Management
AI/ML Expertise
Information RetrievalNatural Language ProcessingDeep LearningMachine LearningSearch RelevanceTransformersLarge Language ModelsA/B Testing
Technical Proficiencies
PythonJavaGoTensorFlowPyTorchXGBoostElasticSearchAWS SageMakerKubernetesKafkaAirflowDocker
Experience
Thumbtack
San Francisco, CAMar 2024 — Present
Director of Engineering — Marketplace & AI
Owns engineering strategy and execution for Thumbtack's core marketplace platform, driving double-digit revenue growth across a multi-billion dollar platform serving 4M customers and 300K professionals.
Built and scaled a 30+ engineer organization across search, ranking, recommendations, and supply efficiency, developing 3 engineering managers.
Helped define and drive company-wide generative AI strategy, influencing senior leadership decisions and enabling adoption across multiple product areas.
Led evolution of ML-driven marketplace systems including ranking optimization, semantic search, and LLM-powered product experiences.
Double-digit revenue growthAI StrategySearch RankingLeadershipLLMsMarketplaces
Mar 2022 — Mar 2024
Senior Engineering Manager — Marketplace & AI
Owned engineering strategy for 10+ software & ML engineers focusing on search experience, search ranking (Deep Cross Networks, multi-objective optimization) and monetization.
Spearheaded technical & AI strategy on critical problem areas while partnering with leaders across product, design, and analytics to shape multi-year roadmap.
+8% revenue growthSemantic SearchSearch RankingMonetizationAI Strategy
Jun 2021 — Mar 2022
Tech Lead Manager / Staff Software Engineer
Led cross-functional team of 6-8 SWE/MLE optimizing Thumbtack's marketplace across search ranking, search experience (autocomplete), and monetization.
Spun off ML infrastructure into a centralized team with its own strategy (feature stores, model serving, observability).
+7% revenue growthML InfrastructureFeature StoresSearch ExperienceSearch Ranking
Feb 2020 — Jun 2021
Senior Machine Learning Engineer / Tech Lead
Drove multi-quarter technical strategy for search ranking introducing new features, models (XGBoost) and optimization targets.
Led ML initiatives around search relevance using extractive summarization to create review snippets from millions of customer reviews.
+1.4% revenue growthXGBoostSearch RankingNLPExtractive Summarization
IBM
Cambridge, MAJan 2019 — Feb 2020
Machine Learning Engineer / Tech Lead — IBM Watson
Led ML engineering on algorithms team (8+ ML engineers/research scientists) for IBM's conversational AI product: Watson Assistant.
Improved model performance for intent detection, entity detection & spelling correction models, deployed globally for over 100M users supporting 10+ languages.
Watson AssistantNLUIntent DetectionMulti-language
Feb 2015 — Jan 2019
Machine Learning Engineer — IBM Watson
Designed & built ML models and evaluation frameworks for search, text classification, and NLU problems for IBM Watson products.
Built ML infrastructure for training & inference at scale (100K+ models in production).
WatsonNLUBias DetectionML Infrastructure
Writing
AI · 2026
Jev-ons Paradox: Why a new AI model named after Jevons may be the perfect test of his 160-year-old theory ↗
Why a new AI model named after Jevons may be the perfect test of his 160-year-old theory.
Navneet's Substack
Leadership · 2026
How engineering leaders can create leverage in the AI-native era ↗
How engineering leaders can create leverage in the AI-native era.
Navneet's Substack
Engineering · 2026
The next phase of AI in engineering is organizational ↗
As implementation gets cheaper, judgment, attention and verification become the new constraints.
Navneet's Substack
Engineering Management · 2026
What do engineering managers actually do? ↗
Engineering management is about shaping systems. Learn a practical framework that connects strategy, execution, and people to drive sustainable impact.
Navneet's Substack
Generative AI · 2024
How We Created a Generative AI Strategy at Thumbtack ↗
How Thumbtack built its generative AI strategy from the ground up — prioritizing AI adoption across search, recommendations, and trust & safety, and developing infrastructure to productize LLMs securely.
Thumbtack Engineering
Marketplaces · 2024
Improving Efficiency of Thumbtack's Online Marketplace ↗
How to categorize marketplace health based on demand and supply characteristics, and apply ML-driven strategies to improve efficiency in a two-sided marketplace serving millions.
Thumbtack Engineering
Engineering Management · 2024
Building Cohesive Engineering Teams ↗
Recognizing and shaping cohesion on engineering teams — lessons from building a cross-functional product team at Thumbtack that delivers consistently.
Thumbtack Engineering
Experimentation · 2023
Shaping Experimentation Culture on Engineering Teams ↗
How to build a data-driven engineering culture with A/B testing.
Thumbtack Engineering
Featured Interview · 2025
3 Engineering Leaders Share Their Teams' Exciting Projects for 2025 ↗
Featured in Built In SF discussing Thumbtack's AI-powered search experience — using LLMs to let homeowners describe projects in conversational, everyday language.
Built In SF
Talks
panel · 2025
The Future of Engineering Leadership
Tech Teams Today Live 2025
workshop · 2024
How We Pushed Experimentation Velocity at Thumbtack
Plato Elevate 2024
roundtable · 2023
Incorporating Advances in LLMs into the ML Lifecycle
ACM SIGKDD 2023
talk · 2023
Shaping Experimentation Culture on Machine Learning Teams
Data Science Salon 2023
talk · 2023
Evolution of Search Ranking at Thumbtack
MLConf 2023
talk · 2022
Comparing Model Development Practices in B2B vs B2C ML Teams
ACM SIGKDD 2022
talk · 2021
Review Relevance at Thumbtack
MLConf 2021
Awards
2024
2024 AI 100 — AI Innovators Award
MachineCon 2024, New York
Recognized for contributions to AI/ML innovation in the tech industry.
2019
IBM Team Excellence Award
IBM
Awarded for AI/ML innovation within IBM Watson.
Patent 1
Feature reweighting in text classifier generation using unlabeled data
Patent 2
Bias detection in conversational agent platforms with machine learning model
Patent 3
Intent boundary segmentation for multi-intent utterances
Patent 4
Artificial intelligence based context dependent spellchecking
Patent 5
Privacy protection through template embedding
Patent 6