I am a curious builder. Tinkering with technology has been a hobby of mine since I was nine and I am grateful that I’ve been able to turn this passion into a profession.

Born and raised in Isfahan, I studied Computer Science for my undergraduate (University of Minnesota) and graduate studies (Stanford).

Through the last decade and a half, I have worn many different professional hats – engineer, manager, researcher, product manager – and worked at companies of different sizes and industries.

My values are to always learn, be in proximity of good-hearted people and catalyze positive change in the world.

🧑🏽‍🔧 Career Highlights

The most up to date resource on my career is my LinkedIn but the following are the three professional/academic highlights that I am most proud of (apologies for the bragging that follows):

1. Helping build a startup from scratch

After about one year as a software engineer at Google (my first job), I joined a seed stage startup as their first full-time and lead software engineer. Together with an incredible team of engineers, researchers and leaders, we were able to build a company from scratch, raise multiple rounds of financing, and have a meaningful exit.

2. Computer Science research at Stanford University

As a mid-career sabbatical, I quit my job as Director of Product at Roche to finish my CS masters at Stanford. While this transition was very much outside my comfort zone, I ended up immersing myself in two years of incredible learning and exploration. The highlight of this chapter in my career was my graduate research work at Andrew Ng’s lab which led to multiple publications including this one in Nature Digital Medicine where together with my collaborators we built a CNN model, a full-stack app, ran a trial at Stanford School of Medicine and demonstrated significant biases that AI assistance could introduce for pathologiests. I also helped build a Coursera course to teach the basics of medical AI which has allegedly been taken by 70k+ students 🤯

3. Helping Build Google Bard (now Gemini)

Through a series of lucky accidents, I ended up working on Large Language Models (LLM) during my time at Google in 2018. This was before ChatGPT launched and took the world by storm. The project for which I led LLM safety and external tool execution ended up pivoting into Bard (now Gemini) and I ended up leading Google Search integration for Google Bard as a Product Manager. This experience gave me a crash course on how Google worked both from a technical as well as organizational lens. While I found the job to be a bit too hectic for my taste and ended up leaving after our launch in 2023, I feel very grateful to have experienced the rush of watching the usage graphs go up on the launch day of Bard!

🙃 Other Fun Things

Aside from computers, my other passion is music. I sing and play an assortment of instruments – though not particularly good at any one.

I have recently found a bit of time to work on a few recordings with a some amazing musicians which you can find on your favorite streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud).

Aside from music, I run long distance and enjoy the pleasant company of our incredibly cute Bernese Mountain Dog, Yoki.

I currently live in San Francisco with my lovely wife, Rana.

Contact

The best way to contact me is via email at .