Marek Li-Ventur

Staff Engineer

In my 18 years of experience across a wide range of companies and teams I have helped teams ship various projects, with a focus on ML and Frontend development. My goal is to bridge the gap between technical and product roles, as well as push for high operational and quality standards.

I have worked on petabyte-scale databases and million-requests-per-second APIs, all the way to one-off game prototypes. If I can spent a bit more time to build an internal tool to make a repetitive process faster, I will do it.

In my spare time I'm part of the team that organises Electromagnetic Field festival and you can find me at traveling around the world on off-years.

Backend Python, Java, Kotlin, Hack
Frontend JS, HTML, CSS, Android
Data SQL, Hive, PyTorch
Languages English, German

Selected projects

Avatar Creation: Create avatars from user provided images via ML.
Frame classification: Categorizing Java methods by using unsupervised learning.
Anomaly Detection: Prototyping, designing and launching CodeGuru Profiler's Anomaly Detection feature.
Launching an AWS service Amazon CodeGuru Profiler. Leading UI and UX work
Petabyte-scale database: Worked on one of the largest DynamoDB tables worldwide

Employment history

Meta (July 2021 - Present), London

TL/Staff Engineer

Worked on avatar creation for Meta's Reality Labs, as well as on API efficiency in the Facebook team

Lead multiple large technical projects, often working between teams and roles, connecting technical artists, ML teams and product owners.
Launched vision-based avatar creation flows, significantly reducing time to avatar creation.
Helped Facebook teams to reduce capacity spends by millions of dollars by predicting prefetch utilisation and shifting traffic patterns to opportunistic server tiers
Helped grow the London Avatar team from 3 to 30+ engineers
Co-inventor for two (pending) patent applications

Amazon / AWS Machine Learning (Oct 2017 - May 2021), London

Software Development Engineer

Working on services that enable Amazon's massive product catalog, later moved to AWS Machine Learning to launched Amazon CodeGuru Profiler

Launched new AWS service
Leading UX/UI for the AWS console component and the profiler visualizations.
Prototyped, developed, designed and launched anomaly detection feature
Strong focus on performance optimisation

Gamevy (Aug 2013 - Sep 2017), London

Software Engineer/Project Manager

As the first-day engineer at startup Gamevy I've worked on game design, frontend, backend and operations, as well as acting as project manager. Frequent contributer to PIXI.js.

Developing game concepts for the majority of Gamevy's games to date.
Project management for various games
Probabilistic modelling to verify mathematical correctness

Last.fm (Oct 2011 - Aug 2013), London

Data Engineer

Initially hired as front-end engineer, I quickly moved to join the data team.

Data developer (Hadoop, Hive, SQL)
Designed and implemented main parts of realtime charts

BSc Science (Oct 2008 - Nov 2011), Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University Mannheim

While working for IBM, as part of a corporate student program