Dave Sherfesee Email & Phone Number

Greater Boston

Greater Boston

* Developed back-end technology to power conversational shopping experiences on branded stores.* Shipped three containerized microservices (Product Selector, Content Validation, CSRF Token Generator) to support the launch of brand-specific Virtual Shopping Assistants (VSAs) on Amazon.com.* Analyzed performance data and recommended changes to reduce VSA bounce rate by 23%.* Developed a web application and microservices that enabled A/B testing of live VSAs. The solution powered 25+ tests and doubled the average VSA open rate and product engagement rate.* Led an effort to automate VSA creation with Generative AI. Selected large language models (LLMs), quantified AI-generated content quality, and demonstrated a prototype to senior Amazon leadership.

Greater Boston Area

* Responsible for machine learning, analytics, data engineering, web services, and back-end software development at Amazon analytics subsidiary, Alexa Internet. Built the team. Introduced Scrum.* Designed and built a secure data lake for clickstream and search data. Specified and configured data governance policies. Designed and built streaming and batch ETL pipelines to populate the data lake.* Increased Alexa’s opt-in data panel size by 250% through integrations with other Amazon organizations and by negotiating agreements with 4 third-party data suppliers.* Generated and published estimated web analytics for 30M+ websites with daily freshness.* Interviewed 30+ prospective customers, identified product opportunities, and prioritized new features.* Launched Audience Overlap, Audience Interest, Keyword Matrix, and ML/NLP-powered Site Screener, Related Topics, Keyword Recommendations, and other features and web services.* Proposed and launched Content Exploration, a service that consumed real-time data from Twitter (6M tweets/day) and Reddit APIs and enabled customers to discover trending topics and web pages.

San Francisco Bay Area

* Achieved profitability in 12 months by launching B2B services and advertising programs. Launched Alexa Pro subscription plans. Consistently achieved 30% year-over-year revenue growth targets.* Reorganized the company to maximize product development velocity. Hired and coached marketing, sales, customer service, product management, operations, applied science, and engineering leaders.* Created annual plans, budgets, and financial forecasts, and secured approval from our Amazon SVP.* Launched Certified Site Metrics, a pixel-based web analytics solution that tracked 1B+ daily page views and generated analytics for tens of thousands of websites worldwide with sub-hour freshness.

San Francisco Bay Area

* Initiated direct ad sales on Alexa.com and increased Google AFS and AFC ad revenue by 99% YoY.* Migrated Alexa’s physical compute infrastructure into the AWS cloud in 6 months via lift-and-shift.

San

* Created the technical roadmap and procured hardware for the web crawler and a 300 TB data lake.* Completed a comprehensive redesign and deployment of Alexa’s legacy web crawler.* Designed and implemented a monitoring and alerting solution for distributed Linux systems.* Designed and implemented a web crawler administration web application and user interface.* Automated web crawler applications, improved content quality, and created operational dashboards.

San Francisco Bay Area

* Led the development of a cloud computing platform that enabled customers to build and deploy new search engines using Alexa’s web crawl content repository and on-demand computing resources.* Set technical strategy, defined project goals, collaborated with stakeholders to prioritize features and tasks, managed releases, and created a user guide and technical documentation.* Procured a third-party HPC job scheduling solution and implemented the data processing framework.* Designed APIs. Wrote critical path code. Demonstrated the service at SIGIR 2005 in Brazil.

San Francisco Bay Area

* Created a Web Graph (17 × 10^9 nodes) service that supported ad hoc queries and batch processing.* Implemented a service that crawled an Amazon Associate’s website, analyzed the page content, identified out-of-stock items, and delivered a report with recommendations to the Associate.* Architect and lead engineer of the Wayback Machine (currently hosted by the Internet Archive), a scalable, multi-tier service that provides convenient access to Petabytes of archived Web content.* Delivered web content collections to the Library of Congress and the Library of Alexandria in Egypt.

Master Of Arts - Ma, Astrophysics

Master Of Business Administration - Mba

Bachelor Of Science - Bs, Physics