Diego Marinho de Oliveira

Senior Engineering Manager / Principal AI — Machine Learning, REA Group

Melbourne, Australia · April 2024 — Present

Global digital property business; home to realestate.com.au.

• Built and managed up to 18 data science and ML engineering professionals across three teams, aligning delivery with Product Managers, Heads of Product, Delivery Managers/Leads, UX/Design, Security, Legal, Consumer and GTM partners.
• Designed and implemented the end-to-end GenAI property-search solution, including evaluation and structured outputs; led its cloud-scale deployment in one month, helping change a search approach established over 25+ years.
• Built the fine-tuning and evaluation framework for subsequent model iteration.
• Designed and implemented the AI agent framework and production agentic runtime for realestate.com.au’s first production, real-time conversational AI—including tool access, guardrails and request/response contracts—and led the design, evaluation and vendor comparison for memory.
• Designed real-time multimodal inference combining listing text and images, then structured delivery across golden-set creation, evaluation and serving to expose 45+ property attributes.
• Modernized a legacy homepage recommender through matrix-factorization training, sliding-window datasets, repeatable offline evaluation and a clear service API contract.
• Led replacement of ageing buyer and renter prediction models, contributing the training pipeline, feature exploration and Vertex AI production approach.
• Established GenAI observability for real-time monitoring, evaluation, tracing and operational debugging.
• Owned GenAI economics and latency through prompt caching, token-level cost tracking and performance controls, keeping production responses within 1–2 second service-level targets.
• Led the definition and rollout of AI governance controls across rate limiting, evaluation, monitoring and guardrails; partnered with Security to ensure the penetration test was completed and the solution passed its security checks.

AI / Data Scientist Manager; Senior Data Scientist; Data Scientist — SEEK

Melbourne, Australia · March 2017 — April 2024

Online employment marketplace operating across Australia, New Zealand and Asia.

• Built and led a global data science team of approximately 10 while hiring across multiple AI teams.
• Led the recommender platform transformation across multiple markets, producing 5–10x gains in a primary recommendation metric and a 12x peak uplift in one market.
• Delivered a unified recommender platform across ANZ and seven Asian markets: Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Vietnam.
• Designed and implemented the end-to-end JobsDB AI search replacement—from source-data ingestion and enrichment through synonym expansion, AI-enriched lists, retrieval and behaviour-aware reranking—delivering a 14% lift in overall user interaction in a controlled Hong Kong experiment.
• Used 150+ online experiments to de-risk search, ranking and personalization decisions and compound gains in primary search, ranking and personalization metrics.
• Re-architected high-volume email recommendations away from an error-prone legacy process using event-driven pipelines and collaborative and content-based methods.
• Used offline evaluation, online testing and load tests to meet approximately 500 ms recommendation targets.

Lead Data Scientist — Catho

São Paulo, Brazil · July 2015 — February 2017

Brazilian technology and online recruitment platform.

• Led a small team of data scientists and engineers delivering production recommender systems for candidates and hirers, improving candidate and hirer experiences through real-time systems at scale and delivering more than 115% uplift in a primary user engagement metric.
• Combined collaborative filtering, content-based ranking and NLP for production personalization across both sides of the hiring marketplace.

Earlier AI/ML and Software Engineering Journey

2006 — 2015

• 2013–2015 — RBS Group / Appus — Machine Learning Engineer: recommender systems, NLP, forecasting and classification using Python, Scala, Java, AWS, Redis and MongoDB.
• 2013 — Zunnit Technologies — Machine Learning Specialist: large-scale information retrieval and content recommendations for commerce and news.
• 2012–2013 — Vale / Visagio — Software Engineer: real-time Java/GWT operational software supporting iron-ore supply management.
• 2009–2010 — TOTVS — Software Analyst: global HR software in C#/.NET.
• 2006–2009 — Computational Intelligence Lab — Research Assistant: artificial neural networks for forecasting and peer-reviewed IEEE research.