Engineering manager at Meta, leading a 40-person org in ads automation. Before that: measurement platform at Walmart Media Group, financial data integrations at Fundbox, mobile analytics at Flurry (acquired by Yahoo), and a startup I co-founded that built an automotive ads data platform from a blank AWS account.
15 years of backend engineering. Distributed systems, ML infrastructure, probabilistic algorithms, real-time streaming. Started in computational biology - my thesis was protein binding site recognition using SVMs, a collaboration between SFSU and Stanford Bioengineering. Co-authored a drug discovery paper with the Shoichet Lab at UCSF.
I build things on the side, usually because I become sufficiently annoyed that something doesn’t exist yet. paper-reader.dev is an AI tool for reading ML papers that I built solo on the Claude API. This blog is published through an MCP server that Claude pushes to directly.
Interests
Outside of work, I tend to fall down rabbit holes.
Technology and systems: AI alignment, agents, recommender systems, distributed systems, historical technology arcs, and occasionally strange intersections like phage therapy and AI. In 2014 I built SecureDolphin, a decentralized encrypted email system using NameCoin for key distribution, which tells you roughly where my head is at.
History and culture: empires, infrastructure, political history, Armenia and the Caucasus, anthropology, and the way technologies and institutions reshape societies.
Design and objects: architecture, furniture, clothing, graphic design, bicycles, and well-made things in general. I have a particular weakness for Japanese and Italian craftsmanship, Danish modernism, natural materials, and things that get better with age.
Music and art: electronic music, jazz, Armenian music, strange bits of 1970s pop, film, books, and immersive art. I’m especially interested in why certain sounds, spaces, and objects feel transportive.
The physical world: e-foiling on the San Francisco Bay, biking around the city, wandering through unfamiliar places, and figuring out how things work by actually using them.
Travel and food: slow travel organized around architecture, history, neighborhoods, food, wine, and places with a strong sense of themselves rather than checklists of attractions.
Burning Man: part art festival, part temporary city, part logistics problem, part anthropology experiment. I’m interested in the art, design, camps, music, rituals, infrastructure, and the peculiar culture that emerges when you build a city in a desert and then remove it.
Based in San Francisco. Reach me at tumanian@gmail.com.