I'm Cyrus (کوروس, Kuros in Persian, which is where the domain comes from), a staff software engineer at Meta in New York, working on ads ranking AI.
My lane is ranking systems, recommenders, and the infrastructure that keeps applied ML honest. Over the past decade that has included recommenders at Dollar Shave Club, LLM fine-tuning at Google, the ML platform at HBO Max, and ranking models that serve billions of people at Meta.
I also spent four years in engineering management, the last two running a 15 engineer ads ranking team at Meta. In May 2026 I went back to building on purpose. The first month back I shipped a computer vision pipeline for NBA broadcast video; the next, an always-on agent that takes orders over iMessage. Management taught me what unreliable systems cost a team.
ranking at meta scale
The specifics of the ads work are Meta's, but the shape of the problems is public: calibration under delayed and biased feedback, exploration against a live auction, multi-task value models, latency budgets measured in milliseconds, and launch discipline where every change has to prove itself against a holdout. A decade of ranking and recommender work, the recent stretch at that scale, turns out to be good preparation for frontier model work, because reward models are ranking models. Pairwise preference, calibration, evals that catch a model being confidently wrong: same math, higher stakes.
the path here
- 2026 – nowMetaStaff SWE, ads ranking AI · back to building
- 2024 – 2026MetaEngineering Manager, ML
- 2022 – 2024HBO MaxEngineering Manager, ML platform
- 2020 – 2022GoogleSenior SWE, ML · LLM fine-tuning
- 2019 – 2020Dollar Shave ClubLead ML Engineer
- 2017 – 2018FacebookData Scientist
- 2015 – 2017HuluData Scientist
- 2013 – 2015MicrosoftData Scientist, Azure
- educationUniversity of MarylandBS, Mathematics & Biology
off the clock
I build things that don't need a roadmap review: an always-on agent that takes orders over iMessage, a computer vision pipeline that watches NBA games from broadcast video, and a leveling copilot for Path of Exile.
elsewhere
cyrus@hadavi.net · github · linkedin · resume