Ritesh Nayak

Resume

Last updated: Feb 25, 2025

I’m an experienced Founder and Product lead, and I have built several 0-to-1 technology products & APIs for consumers, enterprises, and developers.

In the last 2 years, I’ve built and launched three GenAI-based products Avail, CutWaste.co, and Kala.Social.

My background is in Theoretical CS, Math, and Social Sciences. Recently, I’ve focused on AI alignment & oversight techniques while keeping up with AI policies and governance, trying to build an AI Safety product for open communities.


Location - San Francisco Bay Area

Contact: itsmeritesh@gma… or reach out via LinkedIn


Startups

2024 - Present

Founding - Kala.Social & Safetea.ai

  • Building a set of policy management, education, and enforcement tools to help open communities from becoming platforms for hate speech, discrimination, and other illicit activities.
  • Using AI to kickstart a multi-sided marketplace business helping creators from India make money and grow their audience.

2022 - 2023

Founding PM @ Avail - AI Co-pilot for Hollywood

  • Helped the founders build & launch an AI co-pilot for Hollywood studios & execs centered around creator IP working with OpenAI, Bard/Gemini, & Diffusion models.
  • Grew Avail’s creator base 10x in under 6mo to bootstrap the content side of the marketplace


Product @ Google

2015 - 2021

Product II @ GMail

  • Led multiple engineering teams to help GMail pivot to Google Workspace - a productivity platform for the future of work supporting over XXX million daily users.
  • Grew GMail’s xBn/yr consumer monetization business across storage and ads.


Product II @ Android

Led Android engineering teams building contextual/ambient computing features and APIs using sensors like GPS, Gyro, etc. for over 3B active devices. Led the launch of Pixel’s first APK for ambient on-device AI for personalization in 2018.

  • Co-founded the Personal Safety app for Android piloting on Pixel(10mn+ users) establishing standards for the Android eco-system. // Hero feature showcase.

  • Launched and helped setup Fast Pair to scale (seamless h/w pairing) to over 1bn+ Android devices.


Product @ Google Search

  • Launched several one-box search features for local information, search-quality improvements, and monetization initiatives on Search & Assistant.
  • Brought Holiday Hours information to Google Search and Maps responsible for reducing driving on Holidays by XX bn miles.


Founder & CEO @ muHive

2011 - 2014

muHive was a ML-powered Social CRM that helped over 50+ brands manage their customer voice on all forms of unstructured data. muHive was bootstrapped, later angel-funded, and part of the Target 🎯 accelerator program


Research intern @ Microsoft Research

2008 - 2009

Two graduate school internships at Microsoft Research in the Advanced development and prototyping team working on multiple research products in the area of Search & Collaboration.


Education

Masters in CS from IIIT-Bangalore (2009)

  • Multi-agent modeling & theory - Evolutionary game theory, mechanism design, machine autonomy & ethics(early alignment work) &
  • Web Information Retrieval - focus on semantics extraction, algorithms & strategies for NLP & Text mining (text ML) under Prof S Srinivasa.
  • Economic and social impact of technology - an interdisciplinary course that included readings from the fields of ICT research, developmental economics, policy, technology, law, and sociology under Prof B Parthasarathy
  • Advanced Algorithms - Algorithms for distributed computing, and massively parallel data processing under Prof GNS Prasanna


Bachelors in CS

Majored in “Symbolic Systems” & Software Engineering - finite automata, context free grammars, compilers, graph theory, & distributed computing.