Resume - Sheikh A Mannan

Experience

Meta Platforms Inc

Research Scientist / June 2026 - Present

Lead design and training of ML models enabling large-scale e-commerce systems to understand product listings and user search queries across Facebook Marketplace, Feed, Search, Instagram, and notification surfaces.
Own the full research-to-production lifecycle: continued pre-training and SFT of large multimodal and language models for compact semantic representations, and building retrieval and ranking components productionized as data pipelines, feature stores, and live serving infrastructure.
Design, monitor, and run large-scale online A/B experiments and offline evaluations over datasets of tens of millions of products to determine signal readiness for production ranking systems.
Set technical direction across the team's signal portfolio as reviewing engineer and architectural decision-maker for integrating content-understanding and user-understanding signals into production ranking and retrieval systems.

SIGNAL Lab @ CSU

Graduate Research Assistant / January 2025 - May 2026

Developing real-time AI systems to assist human pilots in recovering from spatial disorientation in aerospace control tasks.
Published 8 papers across embodiment, machine translation, low-resource NLP, and human-agent interaction (COLING, ACL, HCII, AAAI, HAI).
Received Best Paper Nomination at Human-Agent Interaction 2024, Swansea, UK.

Meta Platforms Inc

Software Engineer Intern, ML / June 2025 - August 2025

Enabled real-time signal and embedding storage and serving for retrieval.
Implemented multi-seed i2i retrieval and its diversity and latency treatments in the serving path.
Built training dataset and trained, ablated, and offline-evaluated a two-tower neural retrieval model.
Designed and operated the online experiment comparing candidate embeddings for i2i retrieval; established evaluation methodology linking offline model metrics to online outcomes.
Instrumented, monitored, and debugged serving-path changes in production traffic.

Software Engineer Intern, ML / May 2024 - August 2024

Designed, built, and maintained production data pipelines supplying engagement features to the ranking system; registered product features and made warehouse data available at serving time in the retrieval indexer.
Implemented and deployed candidate retrieval sources and inventory filters in the online and offline ranking paths.
Designed, configured, and operated controlled online experiments on live Marketplace traffic.
Defined problems quantitatively, analyzed large-scale recommendation delivery data, and communicated findings cross-functionally including null and negative results.

Colorado State University

Graduate Teaching Assistant / January 2021 - December 2024

Courses: CS314 Software Engineering, CS345 Machine Learning, CS455 Distributed Systems, CS514 Software Product and Process Evaluation.
Held office hours and recitations; developed automated grading scripts for 140+ student courses.
Maintained GitHub Actions runners and web servers for DevOps infrastructure of the Software Engineering course.

Freelance Software Developer

Self-employed / June 2020 - December 2020

Developed full-stack mobile and web applications using react.js, node.js, and flutter for clients based on their requirements and use-cases.
Led the development of a cross-platform mobile application for a food-delivery service; implemented real-time delivery tracking and performed a complete UI overhaul for the platform. The app, Dryvar Foods is available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store and has more than 5,000+ downloads.

Medialogic Pakistan Pvt Ltd.

Data Scientist / August 2020 - November 2020

Provided insights on behavioral patterns in television viewership and extrapolated demographic labels via a probabilistic model onto a 60% larger unlabelled dataset from Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd. (PTCL) for improved television viewership ratings.

Lahore University of Management Sciences

Undergraduate Teaching Assistant / January 2019 - May 2020

Courses: CS473 Networks Security, CS310 Algorithms, CS200 Intro to Programming.
Created labs, programming, and written assignments and held regular office hours to assist students in understanding course content.
Implemented automated grading scripts for all assignments for the Algorithms course to reduce checking time and maintain consistency.

Education

Colorado State University

PhD Computer Science / January 2021 - May 2026

CGPA: 4.00/4.00

Advised by Dr. Nikhil Krishnaswamy. Research Topics: Applied Machine Learning, Human-AI Teaming, Embodiment & Situated Grounding.

Dissertation: "Real-Time AI Assistance for Disorienting Control Tasks: Performance, Behavior, and Trust"

Lahore University of Management Sciences

B.S Computer Science / August 2016 - June 2020

CGPA: 3.28/4.00

Graduation with Merit.

Relevant Courses: Distributed Systems, Networks Security, Software Engineering, Programming Languages, Network Centric Computing, Advanced Programming, Algorithms, Data Structures.

Technical Skills

ML & AI

PyTorch
PyTorch-Lightning
TensorFlow
Hugging Face
Scikit-Learn
Gymnasium
Stable-Baselines3
ROS2
PyRealSense
Pandas
NumPy
Matplotlib
Seaborn

Languages

Python
Java
JavaScript
TypeScript
Golang
C/C++
SQL

Web & Mobile

React.js
Next.js
Node.js
Flutter
WordPress
JUnit
Jest

Tools & DevOps

Git
Docker
GitHub Actions
Selenium
Postman
Code Climate
Zenhub
BeautifulSoup4

Professional Services

Reviewer. Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), Palma, Spain. 2026.

Reviewer. The 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), Abu Dhabi, UAE. 2025.

Reviewer for multiple tracks. International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING), Turin, Italy. 2024.

Reviewer. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction (IJHCI). 2024.

Reviewer. 9th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP), ACL. 2024.

Interests

Video Gaming, Football (soccer), Tennis, Swimming, Hiking, Formula 1

Awards

Recipient of Computer Science Graduate Fellowship, Colorado State University, 2024.
Graduation with Merit, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan, 2020.
Winner of 23rd edition of SOFTEC Programming Competition, Pakistan, 2019.
Runner Up of IEEE LUMS Coding Guru Programming Competition, Pakistan, 2019.