TEOFILO ERIN NARBONETA ZOSA

SENIOR MACHINE LEARNING ENGINEER - SEARCH & DISCOVERY

Teo currently leads the development of search ML at Mercari, Japan’s largest C2C e-commerce marketplace.

When not working, he is either doing BJJ, out exploring Tokyo with his wife, or helping her run Tamadachi Corp., the world’s preeminent purveyor of fandom-inspired artwork, stickers, and other sundry miscellanies.

Biography

Teo’s professional career began with concurrent research positions at USC, UCLA, and a UCLA-affiliated clinical research institution. Around 2014 he attended a chance talk by Alan Yuille on the biological foundations of AI and this semi-obscure idea called “neural networks”. Teo was immediately hooked, going on to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science at UCSD where he was awarded the prestigious Sloan Scholar Fellowship and began work in the UCSD Contextual Robotics Institute.

In 2018, Teo joined SonoSim to build ML solutions for healthcare applications, eventually going on to lead all of SonoSim’s AI/ML initiatives. There, he built the company’s foundational backend and ML platforms, infrastructure, and the entire portfolio of ML applications.

In 2021, Teo joined the newly formed AI search ranking team in the Search & Discovery group of Mercari, Japan’s largest C2C marketplace. He is currently working across various ML & data projects critical to Mercari’s strategic direction while also establishing foundational platforms, processes, and best practices.