India, April 28 -- Behind every product that feels effortless at scale, there's usually a small group of engineers doing unglamorous, high-leverage work that almost nobody hears about. In Silicon Valley, one of those engineers is Himanshu Jain, an India-born, Duke-educated ML engineer working on the models that rank what billions of people see in their social feeds every day.

From Duke to Menlo Park

Jain's path into Big Tech is the kind that's become increasingly common for the new generation of Indian-origin technologists shaping Silicon Valley's AI stack. He studied Computer Science at Duke University before landing a Machine Learning internship in 2021 at one of the largest consumer tech companies in the world, where he built a zero-...