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Staff Software Engineer & AI Researcher at Google Research
About Me
About Me
I am a Staff Software Engineer and Researcher at Google, specializing in large-scale data curation, test-time scaling, and graph algorithms for foundation models. I have been a core contributor to Google’s Gemini models since inception.
Within the Graph Mining and Algorithms research group led by Vahab Mirrokni, I lead the Contextual Sampling and GraphRAG teams. Our work on advanced data curation pipelines, test-time scaling, and training Gemini for Trust and Safety has been recognized with multiple Google Research Tech Impact Awards.
Prior to Google, I earned my PhD at the University of Southern California (advised by Patrick Lynett and Cyrus Shahabi), where I developed Celeris—an open-source, real-time, interactive GPU framework for coastal wave simulation. Built to democratize high-performance computing in coastal engineering, Celeris is actively used by thousands of researchers across 50+ countries and has had its manual translated into multiple languages.
I'm available for AI advisory roles with early-stage AI teams. Connect with me on LinkedIn.
EMPLOYMENT
Google AI
Google AI
Senior Software Engineer, 2018 - Present
2021-Now: I am leading the Contextual Sampling team of Google, developing and applying scalable graph-based techniques on applications ranging from Gemini to Search AI Overview and YouTube.
2018-2020: I was a tech lead in github.com/kartta-labs, an open-source project for unrendering historical maps and reconstructing 4D map of the world. We used artificial intelligence and crowdsourcing to tackle tasks such as 3D reconstruction, georectification, vectorization, etc. Have a look at it here: http://re.city.
Celeria Labs, LLC
Celeria Labs, LLC
Founder, 2020 - Present
Celeria Labs specializes in computational hydrodynamics. Its major product is Celeris, a simulation software for nearshore waves. Learn more at celerialabs.com.
Niantic, Inc.
Niantic, Inc.
Software Engineering Intern, Summer 2018
I was the very first Intern of Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go. I contributed to the launch of Ingress Prime as part of the core Unity3D engineering team.
Google
Google
Software Engineering Intern, Winter 2018
As a member of the core engineering team of Code Jam, I significantly contributed to the launch of Code Jam 2018 competition on the new platform and received a shiny spot bonus for the “heroic launch”.
Google
Google
Software Engineering Intern, Summer 2017
As a member of the Brand Lift team, I scaled up the ad quality measurement tools both in time and space, from spontaneous runs in specific regions to continuous monitoring in several countries.
EDUCATION
University of Southern California
University of Southern California
Master of Science in Computer Science 2016
Thesis: Efficient Geospatial Crowdsourcing for Post-Disaster Decision Making [CONF. PAPER]
Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic)
Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic)
Master of Science in Computational Hydraulics 2013
Thesis: Curvilinear Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics [JOURNAL PAPER]
Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic)
Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic)
Bachelors of Science in Civil Engineering 2010
Thesis: Shear Force Distribution in Open Channels [JOURNAL PAPER]
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Gemini Team, et al. (2025). "Gemini 2.5: Pushing the frontier with advanced reasoning, multimodality, long context, and next generation agentic capabilities." arXiv preprint.
Gemini Team, et al. (2023). "Gemini: a family of highly capable multimodal models." arXiv preprint.
Stretcu, O., Vendrow, E., Hata, K., Viswanathan, K., Ferrari, V., & Tavakkol, S. (2023). "Agile modeling: From concept to classifier in minutes." Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision.
Tavakkol, S., Son, S., & Lynett, P. (2021). Adaptive third order Adams-Bashforth time integration for extended Boussinesq equations. Computer Physics Communications, 265, 108006.
Tavakkol, S., Han, F., Mayer, B., Phillips, M., Shahabi, C., Chiang, Y. Y., & Kiveris, R. (2021). Kartta labs: Collaborative time travel. In 54th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2021 (pp. 5337-5346). IEEE Computer Society.
Tavakkol, S., Shahabi, C., Han, F., & Kiveris, R. (2020). "Piaget: A Probabilistic Inference Approach for Geolocating Historical Buildings." IEEE International Conference on Big Data.
Tavakkol, S., & Lynett, P. (2020). "Celeris Base: An interactive and immersive Boussinesq-type nearshore wave simulation software." Computer Physics Communications.
Tavakkol, S., & Lynett, P. (2017). "Celeris: A GPU-accelerated open source software with a Boussinesq-type wave solver for real-time interactive simulation and visualization." Computer Physics Communications.
(See Google Scholar for the complete list of publications and patents)
ACADEMIC SERVICE
Program Committee (PC): ICML 2026, NeurIPS 2026, AAAI 2027
Journal Reviewer: IEEE TMLCN, Journal of Fluid Mechanics (JFM), Computers & Geosciences, Journal of Hydrodynamics, Journal of Hydraulic Research, JASA, EPJ Plus, Data Science Journal, Advances in Mechanical Engineering, J. Oceanology & Limnology
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