Tal Shaked, previous ML Architect at Snowflake and Google, Joins Moloco as Chief Machine Learning Fellow

Moloco, a leader in machine learning (ML) and growth solutions for performance marketers, today announced Tal Shaked has joined Moloco’s leadership team as its first Chief Machine Learning Fellow. Shaked, who brings nearly two decades of experience building transformative ML solutions for companies like Google and Snowflake, will spearhead ML innovations and investments at Moloco. 

This represents a reunion for Shaked and Moloco CEO Ikkjin Ahn, whose story began in 2009 when Ahn was at YouTube and Shaked was at Google. Ahn’s team at YouTube was the first to successfully apply Sibyl, an ML platform co-founded by Shaked in 2007. This put Sibyl on a path to becoming the most widely deployed ML system at Google by 2015, creating value across Google’s product family including YouTube, Gmail, Android, Search, and Ads. 

Shaked went on to build teams that integrated ML capabilities across hundreds of product use-cases and developed some of Google’s most popular ML platforms, including TensorFlow Extended (TFX). He later led teams in Google Ads that focused on maximizing advertiser value through targeting, bidding, and creative automation.

“It was a unique privilege to work with Tal to transform YouTube, and reconnect again after his transformative impact at Google and Snowflake,” said Ikkjin Ahn, Co-founder and CEO, Moloco. “I am thrilled to work with Tal again at Moloco as our Chief ML Fellow to take our unique and robust machine learning capabilities even further.”

While serving as the ML Architect at Snowflake, Shaked was responsible for creating an overall ML vision for Snowflake, defining a strategy and executing against it, and engaging with ML partners and customers across the ecosystem. 

“ML is arguably the most transformative technology that Google integrated into its products over the last 20 years, which became even more apparent after leaving the Google bubble in 2021 and joining Snowflake. This gave me the opportunity to see the world through the lens of thousands of Snowflake customers, and meet more than a hundred ML & AI companies,” said Shaked.

Shaked continued: “Moloco is a rare company that has both the vision and capabilities to deliver ML-powered applications that combine domain-specific business logic and automated decision-making to deliver products and services that solve high value problems for customers. The ML engine that Ikkjin and his team have built is truly inspiring.”

Prior to his career in technology, Shaked was a professional chess player. Shaked became a Grandmaster and won the World Junior Chess Championship in 1997.