Daniel Tunkelang
Independent Consultant at Self
Mountain View, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDaniel Tunkelang is a seasoned search and machine learning consultant with 12+ years of experience helping product and engineering teams at companies ranging from Google, LinkedIn, and Apple to Canva, eBay, and Coupang. He specializes in search, recommender systems, query understanding, and applied AI—recently focusing on LLMs, RAG, and agent-driven workflows—bringing both strategy and hands-on execution to complex relevance problems. As a former Director of Engineering and Product Data Science, he has shipped core search features across the full stack (indexing, retrieval, ranking, UI) and published research that informed production improvements. He teaches and contributes to education efforts—co-instructing a public “Search with Machine Learning” course and integrating fastText into practical training materials—demonstrating an ability to translate research into usable tools. Based in Mountain View, he consults for high-impact clients as an independent advisor, often working at the intersection of product, data, and ML systems design. An uncommon strength is his track record of improving both online metrics (conversion, recall) and team capability, including hiring and organizational guidance for search-focused roles.
12 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
BS, MS, Computer Science, Mathematics, BS, MS, Computer Science, Mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPhD, Computer Science, PhD, Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
Spanish, French, Italian, German
Stackoverflow
136reputation
14kreached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (18)
python10
text-classification10
scripting9
natural-language-processing9
nlp9
shell9
script9
sh9
machine-learning8
recursion6
ranking6
docker6
math6
complexity-theory6
dockers6
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
gsingers/search_with_machine_learning_course
Jan 2022 - Sep 2022
Public repository for the Search with Machine Learning course taught by Daniel Tunkelang and Grant Ingersoll. Available at https://corise.com/course/search-with-machine-learning?utm_source=daniel.
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:1 review, 63 commits, 3 PRs in 8 months
Contributions summary:Daniel primarily focused on integrating and utilizing the fastText library for text classification tasks within the search with machine learning course. They updated the Dockerfile to include fastText and its dependencies. They also created and modified Python scripts and shell scripts to train, test, and evaluate fastText models using provided datasets. The user demonstrated understanding of text preprocessing, model training, and evaluation within an educational context.
machine-learning
dtunkelang/jiggle
Feb 2014 - Nov 2018
Contributions:3 commits, 2 pushes in 4 years 9 months
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