Utkarsh Shrivastava

Utkarsh Shrivastava leads engineering for enterprise AI at Netflix, where his teams build enterprise search. His work spans Yahoo Mail’s desktop integration and growth experiments, customer-service engineering at Netflix, and tools for Netflix’s workforce.

Extending Yahoo Mail to the desktop

At Yahoo Mail, Utkarsh combined engineering with team leadership. He led a Scrum team and helped establish a growth team centered on experimentation. His product-management partner Keren Baruch describes working with him for two years on growth initiatives; Ratan Hudda credits him with setting up the growth team before leaving Yahoo for Netflix. Their accounts establish his role in organizing that work alongside his technical contributions.

Yahoo Mail’s Windows 10 application illustrates the engineering choices involved. The team reused its web application inside a desktop app, retaining its existing JavaScript implementation while adding Windows features. Utkarsh explained how background tasks called WinJS APIs to update unread-mail counts on Live Tiles and notification badges. This let the application signal new mail outside an open browser tab while building on the existing web product.

Utkarsh was also one of six named inventors on Yahoo’s onboarding feature cues patent application, filed in November 2015. The proposed system uses rules and user information to prioritize and schedule feature introductions. Rather than presenting every user with the same sequence, it makes the selection and timing of cues responsive to information about the user. This was a collaborative patent application, distinct from evidence of a shipped feature.

Customer-service systems and enterprise AI

At Netflix, Utkarsh has recruited engineering managers for customer-service engineering and for the Intelligence and Experience organization in Warsaw. These responsibilities place team building alongside the development of systems used to support customers and employees.

His enterprise-AI work includes leading teams that build enterprise search. He has also promoted recruiting for generative-AI enablement, describing it as an opportunity to help transform how Netflix’s workforce works. That extends the scope of his work from consumer email and customer-service systems to helping employees find information and use AI in their work.