Her Story
About Tanushri
I am a machine learning data engineer with Meta, where I've been for the last 5 years. I primarily work in data processing across Meta's entire family of apps, serving more than 3 billion people worldwide. Most recently, my work has been focused on AI enablement and large language models, specifically on the recommendation side. The machine learning engine behind what users see on their feeds is powered by the data that I provide. A major part of my work involves curating different types of users and their interactions, cleaning them, and making them consumable for machine learning by converting them to embeddings - transforming text to numerical form because machines don't inherently understand text. I also make sure users' interests are correctly matched, including niche interest users. A lot of my work directly impacts the top-line revenue of the company because the better the recommendation system is, the more time users spend, the more ads they see, and the more revenue Meta generates. I've also worked on removing bad actors who misuse the platform to sell fake products like fake bags or publish copyright content, particularly sports events. I worked on identifying those bad actors and training machine learning models that can self-sufficiently and proactively identify them and do soft or hard deletion depending on the level of violation. I've been in the industry since 2010 and have been fortunate to be involved in the same stream for 15 years, which is fairly rare in tech where people usually try different things before finding what they like. This was the first thing I worked on in July 2010, and it's still what I'm working on now, so I've seen the evolution of how manual it used to be and how much automation has happened with AI. I finished my master's from USC, University of Southern California in 2016, with a major in data informatics and computer science, focusing on big data, data mining, and machine learning algorithms. I've been in the machine learning space for more than a decade now.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Tanushri
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to my family, particularly the male figures in my life. My father has always been somebody who really supports and rewards being a high performer. Both my sister and I are high achievers - she's a software engineer at Microsoft and I'm a data engineer at Meta - and we're just two sisters, so my father really sowed that seed of being high performers. We were both academically inclined, and he definitely tried to create an environment where we had those types of resources, whether it was my master's here, my graduation in India, coaching classes, or tutoring. He always made sure we had that support system. He was the first person who motivated me and helped me get where I am. I also have a really supportive husband who is there with me. If I need some time off or if days are getting harder, he's there to lean on in any shape or form. If the house needs more help, he's on it. If the kids need more help, he's on it. He has a full-time job himself, so it gets overwhelming at times for both of us, but even after that, he always prioritizes my health and my well-being. Both the male figures in my family - my dad and my husband - I genuinely feel that I wouldn't be here without their support.
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