Mohamad Charafeddine

Careem's mission is to simplify and improve the lives of people. The journey is still early to grow as MENAP's everything app to simplify everyday life. VP of Product and Data & AI Jan'24 - present: leading data & applied AI on product and engineering. Mission is to accelerate competitive value from data and breakout on GenAI. VP of Product, Platform Jan'23 - Dec'23: led majority of Product at Careem: the super app squads (global experiences, mobile architecture, care, chat, communication, design system, partners, maps & location, identity, billing, settlement), data & AI, commerce, marketplace, & captains squads. The mission is to accelerate and expand Careem's impact. VP of Product, Mobility Platform Jan'21- Dec'22: led product for marketplace (matching, peak, ETA, routing, b2b deliveries) and captains (acquisition, compliance, engagement, experience, payment, Hala (JV with Dubai's RTA)), with 1/4th of the pre-COVID team sizes while powering 3 large verticals rather than just 1, at a time of little to no captain subsidies. Built & grew championship teams. The mission is to power the mobility verticals - ride hailing, food, groceries, and Express (Q-comm). Sr Director, Product & Engineering * May'20 - Jan'21: led Engineering for Mobility of People, Mobility of Things, infra, and Data & AI. That's 75% of all engineering. I stabilized, restructured, and turned around the org post a 30% reduction in force; led the org during COVID, and landed the year with 100% achievement of all goals. * Dec'19 - Jan'21: led Data & AI: big data platform, data warehousing, AI platform, and the Data Science teams. We drove a bottom line impact in Q1 2020 more than all of H2 2019. * Sep'19 - May'20: led product for Care & Integrity. I set the vision, roadmap, & led execution. At Integrity, I re-built the org, drove down leakages, set up the right processes, new IntegrityOps team, structure, and focus. At Care, we improved the Care conversion funnel by 4x, and increased automation.

Product TPM at the Core ML team to bring broad impact for business integrity (Ads, Community, Pages, Feeds, Marketplaces) across Facebook's family of apps: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, in order to reduce societal, political, personal, sentiment, and financial harms.

Director 2017 ~ present | Sr Manager 2014-2016 Strategy and Technical Product Management roles in the R&D AI Team, responsible for setting the strategy, securing funding, recruiting the product team, and defining key product verticals to pursue. Led and delivered AI applications in manufacturing, digital marketing, and retail. Created and leading the product execution of SBrain, a data-scientists friendly collaborative AI platform to easily build and deploy AI models at scale. Product & Strategy Leadership • Set the vision and strategy of the AI Team. Built buy-in internally from the team and from CEO, COO, SVP, VP of R&D • Grew the AI Team’s technical and product influence to become regarded as “cradle of innovation” by CEO • Created and leading Samsung’s SBrain initiative for building and deploying Perception and Decision models at scale o Led customer development, project de-risking, and alignment towards a product-market-strategy fit o Prioritized user stories and features development using lean product management • Led business development with external & internal clients, and led the interactions with academia o Drafted SOWs, interfaced with Legal, negotiated contracts & terms, and performed M&A due-diligence o Led interactions with academic advisors with Professors from Berkeley/OpenAI, and Harvard Technical Product Management Leadership • Led applying Reinforcement Learning (TRPO) to optimize advertising spend for online marketplaces. Patent filed • Led applying Reinf. Learning (A2C) to energy-workload operation in storage servers, paper published at ECML-PKDD’18 • Led 1st introduction of Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit and Deep Learning for offline Ads in Korea (’15) • Tech stack: TensorFlow, Rllab, Python, Scala, Spark, Docker, Kubernetes • Keynote speaker at the AI World Forum Disrupt ’18, and AI & Digital Innovation ’18 on “Reinforcement Learning in the Wild and Lessons Learned”

Principal Solutions Architect ’14 | Sr. Staff Systems Engineer ‘13 | Staff Systems ‘10-‘12 | Sr. Systems Engineer ‘08-‘10 I developed algorithms and production software to diagnose and optimize full broadband PHY-layer access network for telecommunication service providers. Founded by my Stanford PhD co-advisor, I joined ASSIA when it was pre-product as one of its founding core R&D team, and I helped it grow to manage 70M broadband lines when I left (12% of the world’s fixed broadband). It is now managing 100M broadband lines. • Designed and architected multi-million dollar solutions for customers in North and Latin Americas, Europe, MENA, China, and South East Asia. Led RFIs and RFPs responses to major global telcos • Expert in full algorithms development cycle: from data collection to algorithm design, implementation, integration, testing, introduction in mission-critical production environment, and evaluation. Stack: MATLAB, Java, SQL, BIRT • Due to the startup nature, I worked on versatile projects from algorithms engineering, to software engineering, DB backend, features and scalability testing, customer deployment, and trials evaluations and analysis • Piloted a machine learning based churn predictor in the field to reduce churn at a major US telco • Mined Twitter data to gain geo-temporal insights of broadband service quality (used Gnip, later acquired by Twitter) • Enabled data to tell a story and a voice to drive decisions, and opportunities.

Intern at the Distributed Communication group. I researched and implemented MATLAB algorithms for multi-user and multi-hop communication. Paper published at the Conference on Information Sciences and Systems.

Intern reporting to the CTO. I joined at the early stages of the company. I conducted technical due-diligence on MIMO algorithms and the system design. Beceem developed WiMAX & LTE chips, later it got acquired by Broadcom for $316M.

• Co-won 1st place on stock valuation at Berkeley, 2014. Prof is Fortune’s Top 10 Biz School Professors. • Entrepreneurship: Led creation of CloudSlate, an ML recommendation engine for look-alikes Leads Generation from existing customers. 10 weeks: 102 business meetings at 60+ companies. Featured in Steve Blank’s article on his lessons learned from teaching this Lean LaunchPad course at Berkeley & Stanford GSB -- PPT on Slideshare with 80K+ views.

• Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, Smart Antennas Research Group, Thesis: Communication over N-user Interference Channel. Invented the Crystallized Rate Regions approach to study N-user communication channels. • Advisors: Prof. A. Paulraj (inventor of MIMO, Marconi Prize’14), Prof. John Cioffi (inventor of DSL, Marconi Prize’06) • 16 publications, 1 Best Paper Award (IEEE International Conference of Communication). Activities and Societies: Lebanese Student Association at Stanford (LSAS): president, 2005-2006. Organization of Arab Students In Stanford (OASIS): president, 2005-2006.

• B.E., Electrical and Computer Engineering, Graduation with High Distinction (summa cum laude), GPA: 4.0/4.0 • Ranked 1st and on Dean’s Honor List, all years. Awarded Distinguished Graduate Student Award and Charlie Corban Award, in recognition of highly academic achievement, character, and contribution (1 out of 500 students).