Ali Farhidzadeh
Houston,TX
Summary
Tech-savvy and hands-on leader with extensive experience in ML/AI, data science, and data engineering, from development to production. Possessing an entrepreneurial mindset and strong business acumen, consistently identifying growth opportunities and creating value. Successfully worked across diverse industries including supply chain, electronics, food, aerospace, retail, manufacturing, and oil & gas.
Overview
10
10
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Director, Solutions Architecture
Bodo.ai
01.2022 - Current
- As is typical in a startup, had multiple hats on, including Customer Success Manager, Solution Architect, Engineering Manager, Software Engineer, Product Manager, and Pre-Sales Engineer, while also handling marketing through blog posts, webinars, and conference presentations
- Refactored Apple Fraud graph processing code to run from hours to a few minutes
- Parallelized predictive maintenance code for Koch Industries, reducing anomaly detection time on 2,500 sensors from 21 hours to 15 minutes
- Spearheaded the proof-of-concept (POC) processes, successfully converting 50% of POCs into long-term contracts
- Built a Snowflake cost-monitoring system at the query level to highlight expensive customer workloads and identify compute-heavy queries while accounting for concurrency
- Utilized fuzzy matching, python, DuckDB, DynamoDB, and regex, and developed Pytests running on git actions
- Developed a webpage summarizer tool using Hugging Face transformers, deployed using FastAPI
- Drove the pre-sales process, collaborating with C-level executives and stakeholders across Sales, Marketing, and Product teams to align solutions with business goals, contributing to the closure of contracts worth $3 million with Apple, US Government, and Koch Industries, and a few data analytics companies
- Worked closely with Product and Engineering teams to influence product direction, incorporating customer feedback and market trends
- Led initiatives that enhanced the customer experience and drove revenue growth
- Provided technical expertise, built friendly relationship and trust with clients, and articulated the value proposition of the product to potential clients, leading to a 75% increase in customer retention and satisfaction
- Established and led a team of data engineers and solution architects, built and delivered results
- Communicated complex concepts to non-technical stakeholders, and influenced decision-making at the executive level
- Created Bodo’s training videos, available on YouTube
- Trained customers’ engineers to be certified and lead Bodo’s AI initiatives in their companies
- Published blogs, python and SQL code examples, and managed partnership with other companies to co-sell
- Presented at various webinars and conferences.
Head of Platform Engineering
Bodo.ai
09.2022 - 01.2024
- Managed a diverse team of 7 engineers that expanded to 11, overseeing the development of Bodo Platform from concept to deployment and fulfilling customers’ requirements
- Implemented GitHub Actions for automatic git push checks on code submissions to repositories
- Initiated and led a cost reduction initiative resulting in a 40% monthly AWS bill savings by implementing various measures like applying AWS best practices (WAF), optimizing nightly jobs and CI/CD processes, utilizing New Relic, and optimizing storage and cluster sizes
- Ensured Bodo platform's compliance with security standards by obtaining SOC 2 and AWS FTR certifications
- Drove an increase in code coverage from 20% to 80% and streamlined unit test repositories with SonarQube after repositories consolidation.
Sr. Software Engineering Manager
Apple
01.2020 - 01.2022
- Led a 7-engineer team in building a successful platform, resulting in $12M cost savings for Apple
- Designed and deployed a new cloud platform leveraging a Graph database and microservices architecture
- Implemented MPI parallel processing and backend ETL jobs, achieving a 100x performance improvement
- Led UX/UI development and deployed all components on Apple Cloud Infrastructure using Kubernetes
- Automated deployments with Rio (a CICD tool)
- This platform is actively used by Apple managers and planners across the US and China.
AI Architect
Wipro
01.2020 - 01.2022
- Primarily responsible for Apple account, while contributed to proposals and SOWs for other clients , including Microsoft, HP, Technicolor, Cisco, Shell, Kellog's, and GSK, focusing on cloud computing, supply chain, GraphDB, and user insights. Resulted in 15% revenue increase for AI and Data Department at Wipro.
Corporate Data Scientist
Sysco
05.2018 - 01.2020
- Led a team of data scientists in collaboration with McKinsey to develop a Python machine learning model identifying customer price sensitivity, resulting in the creation of a price consolidation model for optimizing pricing strategies
- Built a churn prediction engine in Python that forecasts customer attrition one month in advance and deployed it using Flask API on AWS Lambda backend with a Salesforce frontend
- Transferred over 4000 lines of R code to efficient Python code for multiple projects
- Designed and implemented a US-wide price recommendation system in R, leading to an additional revenue of over $8M
- Optimized and restructured code on AWS platform for enhanced scalability (process 2.3 TB in 6h)
- Collaborated with various departments to implement ML/AI strategies, including Transformation Office, revenue management, marketing, field readiness, merchandise, and procurement.
Ultrasonic Data Scientist
Mistras Group Inc.
02.2015 - 05.2018
- Designed semi-supervised model with Python and decision trees for continuous monitoring of combustion turbines with acoustic emissions from 40+ GE and Siemens turbines
- Utilized data fusion, anomaly detection, classification, wireless data transfer, and cloud storage to analyze 2.5TB of data
- Created damage monitoring system for high mast light towers, opening a $33M business opportunity across 11,000 towers in the USA
- Implemented signal processing algorithms in Python for detecting damages in underground FRP pipelines carrying petrochemical liquids
- Created echo detection algorithm in Matlab for gearbox monitoring in asthma inhalers
- Developed damage monitoring systems for clients like ExxonMobil, SpaceX, GE, Siemens, Hyundai, and United Launch Alliance to assess structural health and diagnose damage, leveraging vast sensor-generated data
- Identified areas for improvement in the manufacturing process of next-gen composite cars for Hyundai
- Optimized acoustic sensor arrays, automated damage localization, and post-processed data using advanced signal processing and machine learning in Python.
Education
Ph.D. - Machine Learning in Engineering
State University of New York At Buffalo
Buffalo, NY12.2014
M.Sc. - Earthquake Engineering
Sharif University of Technology
05.2010
B.Sc. - Engineering
Sharif University of Technology
06.2008
Skills
- Machine Learning (PhD)
- Data Science and Data Engineering
- Python, SQL, Shell
- GitHub Copilot
- Strategic Planning
- People Management
- Operations Management
- Verbal and written communication
- Technical leadership
- Engineering management
- Agile (Jira, scrum, kanban, lean)
- Team building
- Product design
- Delivering
- Customer success
- Snowflake, Databricks
- Oracle, Teradata
- Cross-functional collaboration
- Effective presentations
- GTM (Pre-sale, marketing)
- Product development and growth
- Strategic planning & execution
- Project Management
- Policy Development and Enforcement
- Hugging Face, Transformers, Generative AI
- CNN, LLM, NLP/U
- GPU, PyTorch, TensorFlow
- ArangoDB, TigerGraph, Redis, Tableau
- Salesforce
- Distributed tools: pyspark, dask, ray, sparksql, duckdb, polars, pyarrow
- Workflow managers: Airflow, dbt, Jenkins, Cron
- DevOps, Kubernetes, Serverless, Docker, CICD, GitHub Actions, SonarQube
- AWS (Certified SA-Associate) (Athena, DynamoDB, Redshift, Glue, EMR, IAM, lambda, Route 53, EKS, ECS, EC2, S3, )
- RESTful APIs, FastAPI, Flask
- Eslasticsearch, Kibana, Grafana, Splunk, New Relic
- Azure (VM, ADLS, AzureML), GCP
- Front end: JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Angular, D3js React, Angular, D3js
Certification
- AWS Solution Architect Associate
- Machine Learning, Stanford
- Product Management for AI and Data Science
- Docker and Kubernetes
- Spark with PySpark
- Tableau 10 Essential Training
- Learning Cloud Data Storage
- Managing Big Data with MySQL
- Neural Networks & Deep Learning
- Effective Delegation for Managers
- Machine Learning with Big Data, Coursera
- Introduction to Big Data, Coursera
- R Programming, John Hopkins, Coursera
- Getting and Cleaning Data, Coursera
- Data Science Toolbox, Coursera
- Python Programming, DataCamp and Udacity
- Applied Data Science with Python
- Building Rec. Engines with Python
Workauthorization
US Citizen
Featuredconferences
- PyCon 2023 Salt Lake City
- Bodo Webinar
Honorsandawards
- Wipro: Outstanding contribution Award for the supply chain app built at Apple Inc., October 2021
- Sysco: Recognized employee for creating Enterprise’s pricing model using AI/ML, Mar 2019
- Mistras: Outstanding Performance and Productivity award, August 2016
- UB: U.S. Permanent Immigration Status for Exceptional Ability in STEM, June 2014
- UB: First Prize winner, CSEE Graduate Students Poster Competition, UB, March 2, 2012
- UB: Best Paper Award, 54th Acoustic Emission Working Group, Princeton, NJ, May 21-22, 2012
- Grants during PhD: National Science Foundation, SPIE, ASNT, EERI, LUEE
Publications
- Bayesian decision and mixture models for acoustic emission monitoring of steel-concrete composite shear walls, A. Farhidzadeh, et al., Smart Materials and Structures, 24, 11, 1-11, 2015
- A probabilistic approach for damage identification and crack mode classification in reinforced concrete structures, A. Farhidzadeh, et al., Journal of Intelligent Material Systems and Structures, 24, 14, 1722-1735, 2013
- Damage Assessment of Reinforced Concrete Structures Using Fractal Analysis of Residual Crack Patterns, A. Farhidzadeh, et al., Experimental Mechanics, 53, 9, 1607-1619, 2015
- Fracture mode identification in cementitious materials using supervised pattern recognition of acoustic emission features, A. Farhidzadeh, et al., Construction and Building Materials, 67, 129-138, 2014
Volunteer Experience
- President (2012, 2013), Senator (2011), Graduate Student Association, University at Buffalo
- Conference Session Chair, SPIE (2013), ASNT (2013, 2014)
- Journal Paper reviewer for various publishers in AI/ML applications (2013-present)
Timeline
Head of Platform Engineering
Bodo.ai
09.2022 - 01.2024
Director, Solutions Architecture
Bodo.ai
01.2022 - Current
Sr. Software Engineering Manager
Apple
01.2020 - 01.2022
AI Architect
Wipro
01.2020 - 01.2022
Corporate Data Scientist
Sysco
05.2018 - 01.2020
Ultrasonic Data Scientist
Mistras Group Inc.
02.2015 - 05.2018
Ph.D. - Machine Learning in Engineering
State University of New York At Buffalo
M.Sc. - Earthquake Engineering
Sharif University of Technology
B.Sc. - Engineering
Sharif University of Technology