Ameya Bhatawdekar

Passionate about using AI to help people be more effective and stay safe, I've driven multiple 0→1 initiatives to internet-scale, shipping intelligent systems for Dropbox Dash, Microsoft Office, Facebook, Windows, and major web browsers. At Dropbox, I lead ML Engineering for universal AI search in Dash (search, discovery, recommendations, agentic conversational AI). Previously, I led Dropbox's Incubation organization, managing a portfolio of transformative product bets via rapid development and quarterly funding. I also advise Seattle startups on product development, tech commercialization, strategy, and GTM. Key Accomplishments: Dropbox Dash: Led engineering from concept to production for this 0→1 strategic GenAI product. Drove retrieval, ranking, recommendations, and assistive GenAI, hitting 2x customer acquisition targets and setting 2025 ARR trajectory. Dash delivers multimodal search, discovery, and GenAI-powered assistance across users' content. Microsoft 365 Copilot: Created the Office Domain Specific Language (ODSL) and original Chat Copilot (now M365 Copilot). Led end-to-end ML architecture for natural language commanding across Office, PowerApps, and M365, shaping Microsoft's GenAI strategy and an enterprise productivity product category. Facebook - AI for Multimodal Content Understanding: Developed AI for holistic, pre-trained universal multimodal content representation to combat abuse (hate speech, misinformation, etc.), utilized by Facebook's abuse detection teams. Windows 10 S: Led the company-wide initiative to ship this modern, secure OS, coordinating extensive cross-functional teams (business, engineering, marketing, ecosystem, hardware, OEMs) on a compressed timeline. SmartScreen Safety (Windows, IE & Edge): Conceptualized and shipped SmartScreen features. Application Reputation reduced socially engineered malware by two orders of magnitude (blocking 99.5% undetected). SmartScreen Phishing Filter, the first ML-powered, high-scale client service, used URL reputation against phishing/malware. Windows Safety ML & Big Data Platform: Incubated and built this platform for Windows Safety, enabling petabyte-scale ETL, ML workflow orchestration, and end-to-end systems monitoring.