Felipe Besson avatar

Felipe Besson

Ontario, Canada

I'm an experienced professional deeply devoted to the domains of Relevance and Machine Learning Engineering. I focus on having a good balance of data science and engineering skills to be better at my work and push the boundaries of information retrieval.


Experience

Staff Relevance Engineer

Shopify

Drive Relevance Engineering discipline at Shopify's Discovery experiences team

Jan 2024 - Present (Ontario, CA)

Senior Relevance Engineer

Shopify

Member of Discovery Experiences team:

Mar 2021 - Dec 2023 (Ontario, CA)

Senior Relevance Engineer

OLX Group

Driving relevance engineering of some of the Search and Recommendation components. That covers projects such as recommendations personalization and blending, ranking improvements and search results diversification.

Nov 2019 - Mar 2021 (Berlin, DE)

Senior Search Relevance Engineer

EyeEm

In this short period I work for EyeEm I had the chance to help improving relevance of EyeEm Marketplace search algorithms as well as in Search Services.

Aug 2019 - Nov 2019 (Berlin, DE)

Senior Machine Learning Engineer

GetYourGuide

Responsible for developing algorithms to improve Search Relevance and ranking algorithms for GetYourGuide Marketplace Search. Also, I developed data pipelines to process search metrics and features which are used to feed our ranking algorithms and train our Machine Learning models.

Nov 2016 - Jul 2019 (Berlin, DE)

Staff Software Engineer

Worldpackers

Backend engineer acting in several projects but responsible for data engineering projects such as Search and Recommendations. Worldpackers has an agile and collaborative management environment, then, part of my job also consisted of collaborating on many strategic and product decisions.

Jan 2015 - Sep 2016 (São Paulo, BR)

Senior Software Engineer

Walmart eCommerce

In the first half of my journey at Walmart, I worked in the Search team as a Senior Backend engineering. Our team was responsible for implementing Search and Indexing services and improving ranking relevance. Later, in the global Competitive Intelligence team, I worked in automatic and dynamic precification. I worked in data engineering tasks like creating data pipelines and productizing price forecasting models.

Jan 2015 - Sep 2016 (São Paulo, BR)

Software Engineer

Elo7

Backend Engineer working in the Search team. Our team was responsible for decoupling Search from the Monolithic application, automate Indexing pipeline and improving Elo7 Marketplace search.

May 2012 - Aug 2013 (São Paulo, BR)

MSc Candidate on Computer Science

University of São Paulo (USP) - Institute of Mathematics and Statistics (IME)

Research about automated testing web service choreographies which is a decentralized service composition. In my Masters project I have created a framework and a methodology to apply Test-driven development in service compositions (choreographies and orchestration). My Masters project contributed to 2 international projects: CHOReOS (European Commission FP7 project), and Baile (HP Labs project).

May 2012 - Aug 2013 (São Paulo, BR)

Trainne system analyst

Ingenico Group

Started as Quality Assurance (QA) analyst acting in the fuctional testing phase of several projects. Later, I worked as a System Engineer of the company development tools.

Aug 2007 - Sep 2019 (São Paulo, BR)

Education

University of São Paulo (USP)
Master's Degree

Institute of Mathematics and Statistics (IME) - Computer Science

Automated testing web service choreographies which is a decentralized service composition. In my Masters project I have created a framework and a methodology to apply Test-driven development in service compositions (choreographies and orchestration)

2010 - 2012

Talks

Diversifying Autocomplete

Haystack | MICES | Berlin Buzzwords - 2020

Learning to Rank journey at GetYourGuide: Our Logbook

Berlin Buzzwords - 2018

LTR at GetYourGuide Marketplace

MICES - 2018

Scrapy - Python course (in Portuguese)

CCSL IME/USP - 2017
Blitzscaling session 7 (summary notes)
Stanford University - CS183 (2016)
Agile Methods in Startups (in portuguese)
School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities (EACH-USP) - 2015

Exploring Content Recommendation

Tech talk - 2013

Rehearsal: A framework for automated testing of web service choreographies

Masters Defense - 2012

Blog posts

Useful tips to scrapy web pages with Python
Crawling dynamic pages with Scrapy framework (January - 2016)
Wow! Real-time Recommendations using Sunspot
Boosting your search to apply collaborative filter with Solr (September - 2015)
Launching an autocomplete with Sunspot
End-to-end autocomplete using Solr NGram filter (June - 2015)

Misc

Technical reviewer of the book Vector Search for Practitioners with Elastic

December - 2023