{"$schema":"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jsonresume/resume-schema/v1.0.0/schema.json","basics":{"name":"Gaurav Ragtah","label":"Product Lead","image":"https://saywise-production-profilepicturestoragebucket-kbfooccc.s3.amazonaws.com/profile-pictures/6c4b41cc-6376-48c6-87c4-cc798c4295d9/linkedin-1791356389979.png","summary":"Product-focused founder and engineer building AI products and platforms. Experienced in product strategy, machine learning, and cross-functional leadership across early-stage startups and established tech companies.","location":{"city":"San Francisco, CA, United States"},"profiles":[{"network":"LinkedIn","username":"gauravragtah","url":"https://linkedin.com/in/gauravragtah"}]},"meta":{"canonical":"https://saywise.com/member8038","version":"v1.0.0","lastModified":"2026-10-07T07:00:51.425Z"},"x_saywise":{"handle":"member8038","pronouns":null,"availability":null,"oneLiner":"Product-focused founder and engineer building AI products and platforms. Experienced in product strategy, machine learning, and cross-functional leadership across early-stage startups and established tech companies.","profileUrl":"https://saywise.com/member8038","markdownUrl":"https://saywise.com/member8038/profile.md","pdfUrl":"https://saywise.com/member8038/resume.pdf","archetype":{"code":"HS-DG","name":"Launchpad Navigator","url":"https://saywise.com/sca/9e3d1c881794","rarity":"One of the first Launchpad Navigators on Saywise"}},"work":[{"name":"Milana","position":"Product Lead (AI product engineer)","location":"San Francisco, California, United States","startDate":"2026-02-01","summary":"Wearing multiple hats across product strategy, design, early GTM, analytics, and engineering. Drive improvements to a multimodal agent's output quality by pressure-testing failures, curating ground truth for evaluations, and tuning system behavior. Ship user-facing features like session replay, search UX, and MCP-based agent skills. Built a multi-step agentic report generator for e-commerce shopper behavior analysis. Manage design-partner program end-to-end including requirements discovery, compliance reviews, and feedback loops. Run analyses to identify improvements for customer launches, such as an onboarding fix that lifted completion from 23% to 32%."},{"name":"CatalyzeX","position":"Founder & CEO: Product/ML/Eng","location":"Remote","url":"https://catalyzex.com","startDate":"2020-08-01","endDate":"2026-08-01","summary":"Built a search and discovery platform for open-source AI research and code implementations, featured in Nature, Forbes, CNBC, and TechCrunch. Grew to approximately 1M monthly active users through product-led growth, technical and programmatic SEO, and partner integrations like ArXiv. Owned all aspects: product, growth, engineering, machine learning, partnerships, fundraising, recruiting, and PR while managing a team of 6. Shipped webapp, crawlers, ML classifiers, PDF-processing pipeline, search and recommendations engine, API, and browser extensions."},{"name":"Self","position":"Angel Investor","startDate":"2019-01-01","summary":"Sabi, Pika, Perplexity, Jar, Stripe, SpaceX, Anduril, Hallparty, Sandbox VR, and others"},{"name":"TED Conferences","position":"TED Resident","url":"https://ted.com","startDate":"2018-01-01","endDate":"2019-01-01","summary":"TED speaker and entrepreneur-in-residence, machine learning and AI."},{"name":"Profillic","position":"Founder: Product/ML/Eng","location":"Remote","startDate":"2018-01-01","endDate":"2020-01-01","summary":"Iterated on multiple MVPs exploring AI-powered technical recruiting, data science, and IP/tech transfer to achieve product-market fit."},{"name":"Yelp","position":"Product Management","location":"Remote","url":"https://yelp.com","startDate":"2017-02-01","endDate":"2017-07-01","summary":"Owned and led payment fraud prevention across Yelp and Eat24, achieving a >50% drop in chargebacks. Unified fraud efforts, infrastructure, and operations workflows. Canonized and automated company-wide metrics reports. Led vendor pilot evaluations and coordinated across engineering, operations, data analytics, machine learning, legal, policy, and external vendors."},{"name":"Google","position":"Machine Learning and Data Engineering","location":"Remote","url":"https://google.com","startDate":"2016-05-01","endDate":"2016-08-01","summary":"Worked on Nest's machine learning models and drove data anonymization to balance privacy with analytical insights. Coordinated across data platform, data science, and algorithms teams on a cross-functional initiative supporting product marketing and e-commerce strategy through user purchasing behavior pattern mining."},{"name":"Columbia University in the City of New York","position":"Graduate Student Researcher","startDate":"2015-01-01","endDate":"2016-01-01","summary":"Probabilistic modeling, topic models, bayesian inference, and recommendation systems with researchers from Blei Lab (David Blei) - machine learning lab at Columbia University."},{"name":"Lithium Technologies","position":"Software, Research Engineering, Product","location":"San Francisco Bay Area","url":"https://khoros.com","startDate":"2014-04-01","endDate":"2015-05-01","summary":"(Continued initiatives for Klout For Business, Klout Perks, and data platform powering social/topical influence scoring, topical analyses, search, recommendations, and personalization) Lithium provides a complete social platform to >400 well-known brands like Google, Microsoft, Twitter, eBay, HP, Sony, Fitbit, Sephora, and Autodesk. These brands rely on the platform to power customer communities, respond to social conversations at scale, and derive comprehensive social analytics. Lithium has one of the largest digital footprints in the world, processing 45 billion interactions daily, with >100 million monthly visitors and 750 million user profiles."},{"name":"Klout (acquired by Lithium Technologies)","position":"Product & Data Science, Data Engineering","location":"San Francisco Bay Area","url":"https://klout.com","startDate":"2013-06-01","endDate":"2015-05-01","summary":"Worked on the data platform powering Klout's social influence score serving 12B daily social signals for 620M+ users and 40B+ API hits monthly. Managed serving infrastructure and API enabling brands to build targeted audiences and run campaigns. Owned Klout Perks' business analytics and led a re-architecture of the analytics pipeline improving performance, robustness, and recoverability through greater parallelization and efficient resource utilization, reducing query time from 9 to 3 hours. Launched a promoted post ad-targeting system and shipped klou.tt URL shortener, which generated 25M+ shares. Built a hashtag recommendation system for shared links."},{"name":"ThisYaThat.com","position":"Co-Founder & CTO: Product/Eng","location":"Remote","url":"https://thisyathat.com","startDate":"2012-08-01","endDate":"2015-08-01","summary":"Led design and development of a webapp comparing book prices, delivery times, and payment options across online Indian bookstores. Drove over $1M in book sales and 12K+ monthly unique visitors with national press coverage in India. First non-US venture backed by Wharton Innovation Fund and won Wharton Entrepreneurship's VIP Seed Award."},{"name":"Klout","position":"Software, API & Analytics","location":"San Francisco Bay Area","startDate":"2012-05-01","endDate":"2012-08-01","summary":"Built scalable APIs serving Klout web and mobile clients as well as third-party partners including Microsoft Bing, Gnip, KISSmetrics, MailChimp, and HootSuite. Optimized database queries achieving a 15x increase in requests handled per second and 5x increase in concurrent requests. Enhanced user-session logging and analytics for web and mobile API."},{"name":"SlideShare (acquired by LinkedIn, then Microsoft)","position":"Full-Stack Software","location":"San Francisco Bay Area","url":"https://slideshare.net","startDate":"2011-05-01","endDate":"2011-08-01","summary":"Implemented social tracking, logging, and metrics. Handled conversion of PowerPoints to HTML5 and newsletter spam and bounce handling."},{"name":"Trilasoft Solution Pvt Ltd","position":"Software Engineer","location":"New Delhi Area, India","startDate":"2010-01-01","endDate":"2010-01-01","summary":"• Assisted development team in coding and testing various project modules for software designed for clients in the relocation industry to handle all sales, operational and financial reporting requirements. • Worked with JSP, servlets, MySQL, and Tomcat. • Deployed a customized open-source timesheet management system (eHour) on the company’s local network."}],"education":[{"institution":"Columbia University in the City of New York","studyType":"Master of Science (M.S.) in Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing","startDate":"2015-09-01","endDate":"2017-06-01"},{"institution":"Colgate University","url":"https://colgate.edu","studyType":"Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics","startDate":"2009-09-01","endDate":"2013-06-01"},{"institution":"University of California, Berkeley","studyType":"Global Founder (SkyDeck)"},{"institution":"Cardiff University / Prifysgol Caerdydd","studyType":"Exchange semester in Computer Science"},{"institution":"Springdales School"},{"institution":"Springdales School, India"}],"projects":[{"name":"Music Genre Classifier","description":"- Identifying genres of songs is an important problem in music information retrieval. - Used different machine learning techniques - Gaussian Mixture Modeling, Multi-class SVM, sparse representation classification to classify songs on the basis of their genre. - Used leave-one-out cross validation for evaluation and compared the validation rate across classifiers."},{"name":"Collaborative Filtering with Attribution Error","description":"Research at Blei Lab exploring collaborative filtering from noisy GPS check-ins. Developed a modified LDA approach to jointly model user preferences and sensor noise, enabling more accurate inference of latent preferences and personalized place recommendations."},{"name":"Automated Skill-Validation and Testing (SaaS prototype)","description":"Built a web-based skill testing service POC that seeks to eliminate the subjectivity of resumes and false positives and negatives in the screening/hiring process. We provide relevant, standardized skill tests, allow independent, approved test-creators to auto-conduct their tests, and provide sophisticated candidate and test analytics. The website was implemented using the MEAN stack, and we worked on the business model and disruptive edge, drew up financial projections, performed competitive analysis, iterated on product design+dev, and created a full-fledged business plan over the course of the semester. Our work received the top grade for the Principles of Innovation and Entrepreneurship course at Columbia University."},{"name":"Cloud 9 - Intelligent Dating App","description":"Cloud 9 is an end-to-end dating application that helps sets up potential dates with matches through Tinder, uses NLP against the chat text to infer the match’s interests, preferences, time availability, etc. and helps schedule a date night at a great venue at a perfect time by leveraging Yelp and Google Calendar APIs, and calls an Uber for you when it’s time to leave for the date."},{"name":"Evaluation of iOS App Development Frameworks","description":"- Compared development of iOS apps in Swift and Xamarin, i.e. native vs non-native frameworks. - Analyzed various API and system level calls' effects on app performance, fluidity, and user experience."},{"name":"Colgate Calendar","description":"Students at Colgate are usually overwhelmed with campus event emails and have a hard time finding events that match their individual interests. Colgate Calendar allows students to keep a list of keywords as filter criteria, and to only be notified of campus events matching their individual criteria. Github repo: https://github.com/gragtah/ColgateCalendar"},{"name":"System and Apparatus for an Application Agnostic User Search Engine","description":"Co-invented a user search engine powering user targeting, personalized content feeds, topical expert recommendations, and social media follow suggestions across applications."},{"name":"When-To-Post on Social Networks","description":"Acknowledged contributor on research analyzing the temporal dynamics of information diffusion across social networks and determining optimal posting times to maximize audience engagement."}],"skills":[{"name":"Machine Learning"},{"name":"Artificial Intelligence (AI)"},{"name":"Product Management"},{"name":"Python"},{"name":"Large Language Models (LLM)"},{"name":"Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)"},{"name":"Natural Language Processing (NLP)"},{"name":"MySQL"},{"name":"PostgreSQL"},{"name":"Entrepreneurship"},{"name":"Ruby on Rails"},{"name":"JavaScript"},{"name":"MapReduce"},{"name":"RStan"},{"name":"Redis"},{"name":"Word Embeddings"},{"name":"Topic Modeling"},{"name":"Knowledge Graphs"},{"name":"Metrics & deliverables"},{"name":"Cross-functional leadership"},{"name":"Product-led growth"},{"name":"Data science"},{"name":"Agents"},{"name":"MCPs"},{"name":"Agentic coding"},{"name":"Claude"},{"name":"Devin"},{"name":"Codex"},{"name":"Cursor"},{"name":"Technical SEO"},{"name":"Programmatic SEO"},{"name":"UI/UX prototyping"},{"name":"Strategic partnerships"},{"name":"Conversion funnels"},{"name":"User journey optimization"},{"name":"Web optimization"},{"name":"App store optimization"},{"name":"Mixpanel"},{"name":"Google Analytics"},{"name":"Search Console"},{"name":"PostHog"},{"name":"Looker"},{"name":"Tableau"},{"name":"Hex"},{"name":"Balsamiq"},{"name":"Figma"},{"name":"Canva"},{"name":"n8n"},{"name":"Zapier"},{"name":"Retool"}],"awards":[{"title":"NOVUS Summit Delegate at UN General Assembly","date":"2016-07-01","awarder":"NOVUS Summit"},{"title":"Beast NYC Startup Incubator","date":"2016-04-01","awarder":"Columbia Business School Entrepreneurship Center & Beast NYC","summary":"Incubator program sponsored by Columbia Business School's Lang Entrepreneurship Center and Tamer Center for Social Enterprise, and organized by Beast NYC, 118 Capital, and Columbia Angel Group."},{"title":"Y Combinator Startup School","date":"2016-01-01"}],"publications":[{"name":"When-To-Post on Social Networks","summary":"Acknowledged contributor to research on finding optimal times for users to post on social networks in order to maximize the probability of audience engagement."}]}