Elias Nema leads search and recommendations at OLX Group, one of the largest online classifieds businesses in the world. His team’s work sits at the heart of the product: the ranking, retrieval, and recommendation systems that decide whether a user’s search actually ends with the right listing. He is captivated by using data to solve user problems, and he treats that as the measure of every model his group ships.

Beyond the algorithms themselves, Elias invests in how engineering organizations make decisions. He is a proponent of building an analytics-driven engineering culture, where teams ground their choices in measurement, and of running experiments as the fastest honest way to learn what works. For him, experimentation is not a ritual but a decision-making tool, one that makes teams both better and faster.

Through his writing and speaking, Elias shares lessons from leading search and recommendations in production, from recommender systems to the organizational habits that allow data-driven teams to thrive.