Charudatta (CD) Wad

I lead the Trust and Safety, Payments, Logistics, and Support Engineering teams. I work with cross functional partners in driving a multi-year strategic roadmap to enhance operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. - Architected a scalable Trust and Safety platform, integrating a rule engine and advanced machine learning models, including Large Language Models (LLMs). This initiative achieved an increase in proactive detection of content and commerce violations, a reduction in average handling time, and improved first response time for Trust and Safety tickets. - Developing an AI-first customer support platform strategy to increase inquiry deflection and automation, increase one-touch resolution rates and reduced long-term support. - Redesigned the payment and logistics infrastructure to facilitate international expansion, focusing on increased reliability and global market compatibility. - Integrated trust and safety principles into the product design, influencing feed ranking based on Trust and Safety scores, automating seller approval processes, and gating user access for enhanced platform integrity. - Established product and engineering teams for Trust and Safety, and Support including setting up the foundational charter, articulating the long term vision, establishing cross-functional stakeholder relationships and targeted recruitment of key talent.

Headed a diverse and world-class team of over 80 engineers (encompassing backend, frontend, mobile, data, and ML) across multiple geographies, supporting Lyft's Growth Platforms and Marketplace (Demand/Supply Platform). Growth Platforms managed $900M+ growth budget for Lyft and DSP was responsible for rearchitecting the marketplace to onboard third party driver supply. - Conceptualized and developed Growth Platforms for Lyft, including the Communications Platform, Incentive Platform, Customer Data Platform, In-app Experience Platform, and Paid Media Automation Platform (Symphony). - The Incentive Platform, integrating planned and real-time incentives, managed an $800M+ annual budget, achieving savings over $100M through advanced HTE/Dragonnet models and population management. - Symphony, the Paid Media Automation Platform, oversaw $180M+ in annual paid media expenditure, resulting in savings upwards of $20M. - Communication and in-app experience platforms supported reliable delivery of billions of mission critical messages and in-app impressions. - Led the significant redevelopment of Lyft’s marketplace platform, focusing on integrating third-party driver supply, thereby expanding the platform's capabilities and service offerings. - Oversaw organizational health, encompassing calibrations, promotions, headcount planning, and budgeting. Actively influenced the broader engineering culture by contributing to career development pathways and participating in hiring and promotion committees. - Acted as the executive sponsor for Lyft’s apprenticeship program. Successfully recruited three cohorts, totaling over 30 apprentices, and played a crucial role in evolving the program to a sustainable and significant source of diversity hiring.

- Spearheaded the engineering team, collaborating closely with product, sales and customer success leadership to develop and execute a multi-year strategic roadmap. This resulted in 10x growth over 3 years, culminating in a successful acquisition by Gannett. - Oversaw the technical due diligence for Wordstream's mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activities, ensuring seamless integration of acquired assets into Wordstream’s existing product ecosystem.

Led the engineering team to build various consumer and B2B iOS, Android, and Web applications. Played a pivotal role in steering project direction, and mentoring team members.

Technology Director, Architect for adidas miCoach elite system.

Analog Devices - ADIsimPower Lead a team of 3 to design an Ajax application to enable engineers design DC-to-DC power management. Lead Requirements gathering, Design, Scheduling and Testing. Built using ASP .NET 2.0, SQL 2005 database, AjaxControlToolkit, SpreadsheetGear toolkit, MS Excel. ADIsimPower uses an Excel tool developed by ADI applications engineer as business logic to provide a web interface.

XMDV Tool (Multivariate Data Visualization tool) Project Developed a quality driven data abstraction generation model and enabled quality based re-clustering. Associated raw data quality to structure based cluster quality to improve quality based data visualization. Involved in development and testing of XmdvTool (public domain software implemented in C++, Tcl/Tk and Oracle 9i).