Mark Torrance

Principal Engineer, Facebook

Mark Torrance founded Vinq, a 40-person profitable web design and development consulting firm. He was also the CTO of Rocket Fuel Inc., an AI-driven media-buying platform that was acquired by Sizmek in 2017. Throughout his 8 years at Rocket Fuel, he hired and managed machine learning, AI/optimization, and web apps teams from Series A (20 people) through IPO (1,200 people, 4 years of 145% CAGR, $400mm+ revenue).

Mark has over 20 years of experience in executive leadership, product and engineering strategy and management, and hands-on software development. His areas of expertise also include machine learning, big data, online advertising, robotics, user-centered design, and data visualization. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in symbolic systems from Stanford University and a Master of Science degree in artificial intelligence, robotics, EECS (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wherein 1994 he left his Ph.D. and academic career behind to blaze a trail of entrepreneurship on the newly emerging World Wide Web.

Mark worked as a senior engineering manager at Facebook for 2 years, and is now a senior software engineer working at Facebook on “Facebook Business Suite” for small businesses.