Andrei Lopatenko

Andrei Lopatenko is the VP of Engineering and head of Search, NLP, Conversational AI, Personalization, and Generative AI at Zillow Group, Andrei leads the teams responsible for the company’s search and discovery engines, including search science, development, infrastructure, and operations. As part of this role, he heads Zillow Group’s conversational AI efforts, which consist of initiatives around natural language processing (NLP), speech analytics, call center AI, and conversational interfaces to improve Zillow’s business and customer services. Before joining Zillow in 2019, Andrei led search science teams within eBay and Walmart. Prior to Walmart he worked at Google and Apple, serving as a core contributor to products like Google web search, Apple Maps, Apple’s AppStore, and iTunes search engines. He previously led engineering efforts for Recruit Holdings’ AI Lab where he led all engineering efforts to build support of AI organization of Recruit Holding (a holding of 100 companies in Japan). He founded and sat on the advisory board of Ozlo, a Conversational AI startup acquired by Facebook in 2017. to which he helped to hire the development team, define a product and build a core set of technologies.. He led cross-functional and globally distributed teams of software engineers, applied scientists, product managers, SREs and DevOps which brought hundreds millions of dollars in incremental revenues to the companies such as Walmart. He led company-wide cultural changes in engineering culture and operational excellence Andrei has published at the top scientific and industrial conferences (h-Index 18, 1200 citations of his works by 2020). He is a co-author of 23 industrial patents in search engines, machine learning, AI, e-Commerce. He received the Operating Committee Award in Google for the internationalization of Google Search in 2010. Andrei is an expert in Search Engines, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, large-scale high-load AI systems. He is a strategic and operational technology and product leader, building, leading, supporting core product engineering teams from startups to Fortune 1 companies; he managed people, strategy, operations to design, implement, improve, operate search engines for billions of users, and achieved hundreds of millions of dollars incremental gains. He designed, implemented, led products for hundreds of millions of users. Andrei led teams in search, machine learning, natural language processing, data engineering, product, and analytics operating core technologies for business He hired, coached: ICs, managers, directors; built and led global (US, India, Germany, China) cross-functional teams spanning technology, development, product, research, operations, analytics delivering high impact results to the business stakeholders. Developed teams with scope: research and development, business analytics, ops: driving scalability, stability, reliability, operability of services Successfully led organizational and technological transformation of organizations to engineering quality, operational excellence, and science-driven development In partnership with business, product, ops, he built product & technology strategies aligned with the business, advocated, transformed them into operational plans, roadmaps, OKRs, and execution (100+ persons). Participated in strategic acquisitions and procurement. Successfully led strategic planning, budgeting, management of technology initiatives Andrei earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science from The University of Manchester, United Kingdom and Master of Science Degree from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Andrei is a public speaker, he gave tutorials and keynotes about NLP, Search Engines, ROI of AI initiatives, MLOps, building ML/DS/AI teams, on multiple industrial and business forums. During his career in academy, he presented his research results on multiple top research conferences He led European Initiative on the development of standard of Research Information (CERIF, euroCRIS) accepted in many European countries and by multiple European agencies Andrei actively participated in non-profits both as a member of a board of directors managing budget, strategy, and execution (The Foreign Affairs board of Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund, the board of Jewish LearningWorks) and as a chaplain helping inmates of Silicon Valley jails and prisons with the spiritual and religion needs