Rohan Bhide
Engineer turned Entrepreneur. Went from working on products with 1B+ users to 10 users. I love building products that matter and solving high impact engineering problems.
About
- Born in San Francisco, California, but grew up in Pune, India.
- Went back to study in the states and studied CS & Econ.
- Have 2 dogs: a cocker spaniel named Toffee and a golden retriever named Gnocci.
- Was a wannabe PUBG Mobile streamer at one point.
- Enjoys reading, video games, stand-up comedy, food, and sports.
- Loves to watch Tennis; RF is the goat.
Work Experience
I've worked on 0->1, 1->10 and 10->100 projects across my career.
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Founding Engineer, AI/ML
Dubai, UAE (Remote)
- Leading the development of a multi-agent orchestrated system to boost advertising performance
Baton Inc.
Founder & CEO
Pune, India
- Built and launched an AI-powered influencer marketing tool that helps brands evaluate creators in seconds
- Deployed the tech stack using NodeJS, React, PostgreSQL, GraphQL, AI agents using LLama3 models
- Architected a fault-tolerant public data aggregation system that unified data from Instagram/YouTube APIs
- Built a cold email outreach engine, optimized SEO, and drove ad creation and deployment on LinkedIn, Reddit, and Meta
- Took the company to 5-figure ARR with 5+ clients with yearly contracts
StubHub
Technical Lead Manager (L6)
New York, USA
- Transitioned horizontally from Lead Senior SWE to Technical Lead Manager after 6 months
- Architected and deployed the migration of our ticket seller payment calculation logic from a legacy SQL script to a micro-service architecture with the eventual goal of dynamic calculation and dispatch
- Payout calculation service handled approximately $10B in monetary value every year; Daily computations consisted of 100K transactions, 20K payments and 10K sellers daily; Reduced runtime from 3 hours to 2 minutes due to aggresive paralleization; Made the system logically fault tolerant and not failing due to a single seller
- Helped the company become Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliant by collaborating with external consultants to implement change management enforcement, duty separation, and immutable audit logs ahead of the 2025 IPO
- During a 2-day hackathon, trained an SVM-based ML model to route credit card authorization to different providers that reduced the absolute false decline rate by 2.4% and contributed an estimated additional $1.8M annually (later productionized)
- Improved pre-emptive TIN collection rates by 48% to be compliant with American Rescue Plan Act of 2021
- Championed a higher standard for rigorous A/B testing across the org, enforcing stricter statistical significance thresholds and long-term holdout groups to prevent false positives and ensure long-term metric health
- Managed 3 direct reports (Mid-to-Senior level), owning the full employee lifecycle: from sourcing and recruiting to performance management, immigration advocacy, and driving internal promotions
Technical Lead / Senior Software Engineer (L5)
San Francisco & New York, USA
- Served as Technical Lead for Video Ads across Instagram Feed and Stories, driving engineering strategy and execution
- Optimized video ad performance and monetization models, consistently delivering year-over-year revenue growth; Improvements directly led to a 0.06% CTR lift and $7M IG Ads annual revenue
- Partnered cross-functionally with product, marketing, legal, and public relations teams to successfully launch major feature releases
- Mentored a team of three engineers, guiding their technical development and successfully supporting their promotion paths to L4
- Conducted extensive candidate interview loops, assessing behavioral fit, system design architecture, and core coding competencies
- Directed rapid incident response for a high-priority privacy event, swiftly mitigating the issue and earning leadership recognition for effective crisis management
Meta
Senior Software Engineer (L5)
San Francisco, USA
- Started as Software Engineer L3; promoted to L4 after 1 year and then L5 after 1.5 years
- (2018) Started on the Search High Confidence team, building special product experiences for high intent search queries
- (2019) Launched a revamp of the Sports high intent queries on FB Search, which led to stat sig. increased CTR and search sessions
- (2020) The team pivoted to focusing on improving the "Hashtags as Cultural moments" experience on the FB App and I led the creation workstream
- (2020) Architected and built the hashtag typeahead feature e2e from retrieval and ranking to the android and web clients which led to huge adoption across users, celebrities, pages and businesses leading to a 16% increase in hashtag usage and receiving +1 billion API requests daily
- (2021) Lead product engineer on the FB App Mentions workstream, working on improving the mentions experience and platform; Improvements led to 2M increase in mentions volume, 1.6M increase in FB app sessions and 12M increase in story views daily
Meta
Software Engineering Intern (Applied Machine Learning)
San Francisco, USA
- Worked as a software engineering intern on the Applied Machine Learning department's Language Technology and Translation team (LATTE)
- Internship project was Multilingual Composer: a feature that allowed a user to compose a post in multiple languages and have the right translation shown to each viewer
- Worked XFN with the Composer team on building automatic translation pipelines during composing
- Designed an ML system that determined the right translation of each post to be shown to each viewer based on a variety of signals
- Worked XFN with the NewsFeed team to ensure that the right translation was shown to each viewer using the ML system above
Education
University of Pennsylvania
Bachelor's of Science in Engineering: CS & Economics
2014 - 2018
Databases & Relational Algebra
Advanced Algorithm Design
Scalable Cloud Computing
Linear Algebra
Crowdsourcing and Human Computation
Algorithms & Data Structures
Design of Programming Languages
Microeconomics
Macroeconomics
Chaos Theory and System Dynamics
Network Theory
Computational Game Theory
Stochastic Systems
Independent Research on Database Systems
Fergusson College
HSC Diploma (12th Standard)
2012 - 2014
CS: Software
CS: Hardware
Mathematics
Physics
Chemistry
English
St Mary's School
ICSE Diploma (10th Standard)
2012
English
Mathematics
Hindi
Environmental Education
Chemistry
Physics
Biology
History & Civics
Geography
Commercial Applications
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Contact
Get in Touch
Want to chat? Just shoot me an email here and I'll respond whenever I can. I will ignore all soliciting.