Ben Liebald

Ben Liebald has a strong and diverse work experience in the technology industry. Ben currently holds the position of Engineering Director at Figma, a design and prototyping tool company. Prior to this, they served as the Chief Technology Officer at Branch International, a mobile banking and lending platform, and also held the role of Head of Engineering at the same company. Ben is also a co-founder and former CTO of Rep - Mensch Labs, a customer assistance platform for online brands. Earlier in their career, Ben worked at YouTube as a Senior Engineering Manager, responsible for various YouTube Discovery features. Ben played a key role in co-founding the personalization efforts at YouTube and led the development of core recommendation systems. Before joining YouTube, Ben worked at Google as a Senior Software Engineer, where they worked on projects related to search ranking, web spam, and content discovery. Ben also led an engineering team to develop personalization and recommendation features on various Google properties. Ben started their career as a Research Assistant at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where they focused on developing machine learning models for computer security applications and conducted research in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and bioinformatics.

Ben Liebald holds a BSc in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from Jacobs University Bremen. Furthermore, they have pursued an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The specific start and end years for both degrees are not provided.