Mars Lan

Mars Lan is the current Chief Technical Officer at Metaphor Data. They previously worked as a Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn from January 2017 to November 2020. There, they led a team of 16 engineers in building the core metadata infrastructure for LinkedIn. This infrastructure powers search & discovery, impact analysis, data privacy enforcement, and ML pipeline orchestration. A large part of their work has been shared with the open source community through GitHub.

Mars Lan started their career at Google as a Senior Software Engineer from July 2013 to January 2017. There, they enabled Gboard personalization using on-device Gmail data to improve suggestion accuracy. Prior to that, they worked as a Software Engineer Intern at Google from June 2012 to September 2012 and again from June 2011 to September 2011.

Before joining Google, Mars Lan worked as an Interim Engineering Intern at Qualcomm from June 2009 to September 2009. After that, they worked as a Software Engineer at Navico from April 2007 to August 2008. Their career started at Navman New Zealand where they worked as a Product Development Engineer from November 2004 to August 2006.

Mars Lan has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, an MS in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a BE in Computer Systems Engineering from The University of Auckland. Mars is also a certified Japanese Language Proficiency Test Level 1 from the Japan Educational Exchanges and Services.

Mars Lan reports to Pardhu Gunnam, CEO. Seyi Adebajo - Founding Engineer, Ivan Perepelitca - Founding Engineer, and Yi Wang - Founding Engineer report to Mars Lan. They are on a team with Desi Bogdanova - Founding Designer, Scott Huang - Software Engineer, and Kirit Basu - Head of Product.