Yoelle Maarek

The first engineering hire of Google Israel, Maarek established the company's development center in Haifa in 2006 and led the team that launched Google Suggest worldwide on the Google homepage in 2008. Now known as Google query autocomplete, the feature was also rolled out on YouTube shortly after its homepage debut.

A Tunisian-born Israeli computer scientist, Maarek held senior research and engineering roles across major technology companies. She served as Vice President of Research at Yahoo! Labs, where she led several labs and oversaw Mail Search, among other areas. She later served as Vice President of Science and Research at Amazon, with responsibility for Alexa Shopping Research. She served as Chief Researcher of AI/IR at the Technology Innovation Institute.

Maarek is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and a member of the SIGIR Academy.