I have always had an itch to help the communities around me. But my experiences at Microsoft and GoDaddy, while truly impactful, had not satisfied it fully. And so, after my graduation from Carnegie Mellon, I chose Meta to help me in the next chapter of my career. At Meta, I had access to the largest datasets in the world. And I used my AI skills to transform this massive data into a commercial recommendation system that would serve billions of users every day. By connecting the people with the most valuable products, I finally achieved my goal of serving the community.

However, my euphoria was short-lived. I quickly realized that the biggest problem that our communities are facing right now is not just being connected to the right content out there. But rather removing all the bad content that is shared on the platform everyday, such as nudity, violence, scam, fraud and more. And so, once again, I decided to shift gears and use AI to solve one of the most pressing problems plaguing our communities right now: quality at Instagram. It is the largest social network in the world where people have shared hundreds of billions of photos and videos. Quality (or called Integrity at Meta) is akin to cleaning the house and taking out the trash regularly. We find the bad actors, penalize them when needed, and take actions to ensure that this does not repeat in the future.

On the outside, Instagram is a fun app that gets people their daily dose of cute dogs, fancy travel destinations, delicious recipes and much more. But behind the curtains, Instagram is managing a tricky 3-way balance between its viewers, creators and businesses. So every day is about making decisions that maximize the value that each of these stakeholders derive from the Instagram ecosystem. As the technical leader for Integrity on Instagram, my job was to make sure that only the highest quality content is shown to our users. This involves identifying bad content from hundreds of millions of photos uploaded everyday and finding bad actors from a user base of billions. This is like finding a needle in a haystack, which translates to some very cool technical problems that only a few opportunities with this scale can offer. And yes, I got to scroll Instagram at work. So that was a nice benefit!