Andras Benke

Chief Technology Officer

2024 - Current

Chief Data Scientist

2019 - 2024

Leading, managing our Data Science, Data Acquisition, and Innovation Labs teams. Leading and contributing to developing purpose-based, machine learning data pipelines to generate insights from a wide variety of media sources, at scale, for our enterprise and public sector customers. Major technologies are: Spark on Databricks, Scala, Java, Python, SQL (yeah, it's still a thing, powerful), Natural Language Processing techniques, Large Language Models, Neural Network and Ensemble Machine Learning algorithms, Postgres, Redis, AWS S3 / SageMaker / Ground Truth / etc, Apache Storm, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Neo4j, and many more.

Chief Software Architect, Manager of Data Science & Innovation Labs

2014 - 2019

• Working with the engineering and product management teams to develop our realtime cross-media analytics platform. • Managing our Innovation Labs and Data Science team, as we are working on new analytical algorithms, applying machine learning technics and taking data visualization to the next level. Creating and protecting intellectual property for Zignal Labs. • Using Apache Storm, Kafka, Spark, Elasticsearch, AWS stack, mostly scala, nlp and machine learning libraries, neural networks and whatever is needed... I love working here

Data Science Advisor

2024

Principal Architect - Big Data

2012 - 2014

• Redesigned the outdated Related Search product that's generated 18% of Ask.com's revenue, to work on Hadoop and Hive big data stack. • Built a realtime suspect detection system to identify malicious traffic patterns. • Built a realtime user traffic monitoring system - for the BI team to monitor the business impact of website releases and advertiser behavior changes, and for the product engineering team to determine system and infrastructure failures. • Used Storm, Redis, RabbitMQ, MySQL and the Hadoop stack with mostly Scala. ...it was fun...

Senior Software Engineer / Tech Lead

2011 - 2012

• Lead a cross functional team to build the new Klout score and extract most influential content for 400 million twitter, facebook, linkedin, google+ users. • Managed and contributed to the full stack of the features including the big data infrastructure, large scale data processing pipelines, efficient data storage, data serving API and data science algorithms • Completed the research study of "The life of a tweet": https://venturebeat.com/2011/11/04/klout-retweet-data/ ...it was intense, it was challenging, I loved it...

Principal Software Engineer

2010 - 2011

Worked in a small team and built new features for Informatica’s data integration designer tool.

Senior Research Engineer

2008 - 2010

• Contributed to research and data analysis projects to determine physical location of IP addresses with high accuracy. Added new data mining and classification logic to the existing patented IP geo-location data generation engine • Built out the first IPv6 geo-location data product for Quova by assigning location data to the potential 340 undecillion (3.4×10^38) IP addresses. • Had been an early adaptor of Yahoo's Hadoop technology stack, HDFS, Map/Reduce, Hive. Optimized Hadoop job by replacing Hive jobs running for 24-hours with customized, native map-reduce code and reduced runtime under 15 minutes. ~ this was a big deal that time, believe me! :) • Used Java, Spring, Swing, Jess, R and whatever else was needed - in an Agile environment. ...and I loved it...

Senior Java Developer

2007 - 2008

Built applications to communicate with ViVOtech contactless card readers and cards, implemented new cryptography algorithms. Used Java, Swing, C, JNI, and other device communication techniques. ...and I loved it too...

Senior Java Developer

2006 - 2008

H1B sponsor company. Assigned contracts: • ViVOtech (September 2007 – March 2008) ~ see above • Andesa Services Inc (July 2007 – August 2007) Frontend development on the insurance software solution of Andesa Services. Java, J2EE, JBoss, RMI, Swing, XML, Oracle. • TruePosition (February 2006 – June 2007) Built new configuration and monitoring features for wireless E911 calls' localization services. Java, Swing, RMI, JDBC, SNMP, XML, UNIX

Lead Java Developer

2004 - 2006

Built a company management, and retail account management system and framework in a small startup environment.

Lead Java Developer

2003 - 2004

Built customizable Java framework for touchscreen KIOSK machines. Developed in-bank customer service and in-store marketing applications on top of the KIOSK system.