Shivani Poddar is an Engineering Lead at Google Research working on applied research to launch generative AI products at scale. She is an experienced leader with a track record of growing teams to execute ambitious goals in turbulent environments. Previously she was the machine learning tech lead for the meeting assistant team at Workplace, Facebook, leading the development of conversational AI for making remote collaboration easier for work. Shivani also built and launched the foundational machine learning and AI stack for Facebook Portal, spearheading product and engineering development across social graph technology for ML, deep personalization for a smarter calling experience. She was the first ever student at Carnegie Mellon to be funded by the Amazon Alexa Prize, where she and her team built a social chatbot, and eventually deployed it to tens of thousands of users through Amazon Alexa. During her time at CMU she also pursued research in the field of natural language generation, reinforcement learning for chatbots and multimodal machine learning.