AVANI SHARMA
San Jose,CA
Summary
Seasoned engineering and machine learning leader with experience in trust and safety, payments, ecommerce and risk management domain for 15+ years in Fintech, Payments and Marketplaces industries. As a technology-savvy and result-oriented engineering leader, I bring a wealth of experience in driving profitable growth through automations and effective execution of strategic initiatives. With a proven track record of success in managing cross-functional teams, building high performing teams and clear communication, I am confident in my ability to make a significant contribution to your organization.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/avanisharma/
Overview
18
18
years of professional experience
Work History
Director of Engineering, Trust and Saefty Team
Instacart
04.2022 - 01.2024
- Delivered sizeable business impact by driving organization wide profitability goals through shopper and customer abuse and fraud detection
- Developing and executing a ML driven strategic plan for the people engineering team: This involves setting goals and OKRs, defining priorities, and allocating resources in a way that supports the overall business strategy
- Built and executed on organization wide strategy with cross-functional leaders in Trust and Safety Product, Data Science and Operations teams to achieve business objectives and surface gaps
- Encouraged team collaboration and motivated individual employees by aligning their interests with business goals
- Improved operational excellence in the organization to create high-standards of engineering through incorporating automations and efficiencies by building internal tools and automation pipelines
Head of Risk & Fraud Engineering & Data Science
Robinhood Markets
Menlo Park, CA
10.2020 - 04.2022
- Hired team of 35+ software and machine learning engineers and data scientists and 4 managers. Structured the team to work effectively and be highly impactful.
- Coached and mentored team members for career growth
- Built the rules engine and machine learning platform from ground up by building a scalable and reliable rules engine, features platform and automated machine learning model training.
- Enabled new product launches and improved existing products by building the risk controls
- Impact driven - built safe user experiences while driving down fraud loss on the platform
Senior Manager, Fraud and Abuse Detection
Wepay, a Chase Company
Redwood City, CA
04.2017 - 10.2020
- Drove down loss numbers by 50%
- Built automated machine learning pipelines infrastructure from scratch
- Hired and built a full stack team of engineers and data scientists
- Deployed state of the art machine learning models and built interpretability into the ML models
- Drove operational excellence by building processes and standards as the team grows
- Collaborated with product, engineering, business
Merchant & Compliance Risk Lead
PayPal Holdings Inc
San Jose, CA
12.2012 - 04.2017
- As part of PayPal Risk Detection team, led Merchant Risk and Compliance projects that provide measurable impact to the business towards brand reputation
- Developed and deployed ML models that improve loss catch by 30-40%, Anomaly detection for Compliance Risk
- Collaborated with teams globally ; awarded by leadership for this effort
- Influenced women to participate and present in external events by leading by example
Member of Technical Staff, Trust Science
Ebay Inc
San Jose, CA
03.2008 - 12.2012
- Self-starter and learner; ramped up on Machine learning and Data Science skills
- Built segmented models and intelligent features using effective feature selection techniques to reduce Bad Buyer experiences by 30%
- Enhanced ML models' interpretability by building tools that provided reason codes for risky transactions
Software Engineer
AT&T
12.2005 - 03.2008
- Telecom billing Software using C/C++, Perl, shell scripting
Education
Master of Computer Application -
VJTI, Mumbai
Bachelor of Science -
Miranda House College, Delhi
Timeline
Director of Engineering, Trust and Saefty Team
Instacart
04.2022 - 01.2024
Head of Risk & Fraud Engineering & Data Science
Robinhood Markets
10.2020 - 04.2022
Senior Manager, Fraud and Abuse Detection
Wepay, a Chase Company
04.2017 - 10.2020
Merchant & Compliance Risk Lead
PayPal Holdings Inc
12.2012 - 04.2017
Member of Technical Staff, Trust Science
Ebay Inc
03.2008 - 12.2012
Software Engineer
AT&T
12.2005 - 03.2008
Master of Computer Application -
VJTI, Mumbai
Bachelor of Science -
Miranda House College, Delhi