The Tech Trek

Meet: Chris Ham is the Engineering Operations Manager and Chief of Staff to the CTO at Novantas. He is responsible for DevOps, Cloud/on-prem implementation and integration, the interface between Engineering and Infrastructure, and Big-data infrastructure.

Chris’s career path has focused on blending leadership and deep technical expertise. His CV includes:

-Continued service, including a deployment, as an officer in the US Navy Reserve

-A background in corporate Tech Ops finance

-Work as a quant in the bank treasury/risk space

What you’ll learn:

Leveraging his military management experience

Partnering with DevOps and the strategic technology roadmap

Transitioning from the military to the private sector

If you have any questions for  Chris, please feel free to reach out via LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-l-ham/

Meet: Maria Latushkin is responsible for leading Omada Health’s technology vision and team.

Prior to joining Omada Health and moving to the healthcare space, Maria has spent over 15 years in eCommerce, retail, and enterprise SaaS companies ranging from series B startups to large companies, such as Walmart.

What you’ll learn:

Don’t hire for culture fit, make culturally additive hires

Hiring people for the right context for your environment or stage of growth

Signals that you might need to add process to your org

Adjusting style and process in supporting a fully distributed engineering org

If you have any questions for Maria, please feel free to reach out via LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/maria-latushkin-799700/

Meet: Greg Miaskiewicz, CEO & Co-Founder at Capbase, a startup building legal & financial tools for startups. Previously, CEO & Co-Founder of Swarm, a bot detection startup, which exited to Integral Ad Science in 2016. Greg has over a decade of experience working at early-stage Silicon Valley startups in product, engineering, and design roles.

What you’ll learn (disclaimer - this is not legal advice):

Avoiding pitfalls in forming your startup’s legal entity

Implications of incorrectly setting up your entity

What to look for in evaluating equity as apart of a job offer

If you would like to reach out to Greg about anything he discussed on the podcast, please reach out to him via:

https://twitter.com/miaskiewicz

https://www.instagram.com/miaskiewicz/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/miaskiewicz/

email: [email protected]

Meet:  Sanji Fernando is a senior vice president at Optum, where he leads the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Analytics Platforms team for Optum Enterprise Analytics (OEA).  He is responsible for developing platforms that support the design and development of leading-edge AI models and analytic tools for the enterprise.

Previously, Sanji was a vice president at OptumLabs and led the OptumLabs Center for Applied Data Science (CADS).  The CADS team applied breakthroughs in AI and machine learning to solve complex health care challenges for UnitedHealth Group (UHG) by developing and deploying software product concepts. CADS pioneered using deep learning to streamline administrative processes in revenue cycle management and developed graph analytics tools to support provider network design, among other innovations.

Sanji joined OptumLabs in 2014 from Nokia, where he created Nokia’s first data science team.  His team launched the first big data computing cluster at Nokia, using cluster derived insights on user activity and engagement to design new product concepts.  Before that, Sanji spent 9 years at Nokia in a variety of corporate roles with Nokia’s Multimedia Division, Nokia Research Center, and Nokia Ventures.

Prior to Nokia, Sanji was a co-founder and VP of Engineering at Vettro, a venture-backed mobile software company.  Sanji began his career in consulting with Viant and Accenture.

Sanji is a graduate of Trinity College with a bachelor’s degree in computer science.  He lives in the Boston area with his wife and their three boys.  In his free time, Sanji enjoys coaching his sons in basketball and baseball.   He also serves on the board of his local Little League.

What you’ll learn:

Evaluating the value of AI solutions

Growth of AI in the healthcare space

Establishing short and long term goals

Sanji mentioned our annual survey on AI in health care and we recently shared the findings from our 3rd annual survey; we have both a press release and special report on that.

If you would like to reach out to Sanji about anything he discussed on the podcast, please reach out to him via:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjifernando/

Meet: Marick S. Sinay, Ph.D. is Vice President Head of Data Science and Analytics for Aspiration. Dr. Sinay has been in the broader financial services industry in various quantitative financial modeling and data science roles. He has experience working at large financial institutions, Bank of America and Western Asset Management, as well as at FinTech startups in the Los Angeles area. Dr. Sinay has successfully hired and led teams of data scientists, data analysts, and data engineers to drive business intelligence and advanced predictive analytics using machine learning to solve enterprise initiatives. He has a Ph.D. in Statistics and Applied Probability, Masters in Statistics, and a Masters in Economics from the University of California Santa Barbara.

What you’ll learn: 

Career advice - tips and advice for analyst and data scientists to grow

Building data teams - do’s and don’ts to building a successful diverse team

Meet:  Ankur Goyal is the co-founder and CEO of Impira. previously built and scaled the engineering team at MemSQL as employee #2 and VP of Engineering. Ankur received his B.S. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. He also holds several patents in database technology.

What you’ll learn:

Extracting more value out of documents

Helping companies automate their paper processes to digital

Getting an AI project into production and the related ROI

Talking about a new feature that allows someone to extract information from any doc through the UI

If you would like to reach out to Ankur about anything he discussed on the podcast, please reach out to him via:

https://twitter.com/ankrgyl?lang=en

https://twitter.com/impirahq

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ankrgyl/

Meet:

Ash Berlin-Taylor is an active committer and member of the PMC for Apache Airflow and Director of Airflow Engineering team at astronomer.io. Before getting involved with Airflow he spent many years working in (web) infrastructure

Kaxil Naik is currently the Committer, PMC Member, and Release Manager of Apache Airflow. He is also the Manager of Airflow Engineering team @ Astronomer. He did his Masters in Data Science & Analytics from Royal Holloway, University of London.

What you’ll learn:

Major features in the upcoming Airflow 2 release

Upgrade path and compatibility

What the team might be working on in future releases

Learn more about the upcoming release: https://www.astronomer.io/blog/introducing-airflow-2-0

If you would like to reach out to Ash or Kaxil about anything they discussed on the podcast, please reach out to them via:

https://twitter.com/kaxil

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaxil/

https://twitter.com/ashberlin

Meet:  Mike Bennett, Director of Enterprise Digital Farming at Climate Corp - Bayer Crop Science.  Responsible for Enterprise data governance and new business models.

What you’ll learn:

Mentoring vs coaching

Leadership through influence

Importance of messaging and tone

If you would like to reach out to Mike about anything he discussed on the podcast, please reach out to him via:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelsbennett

https://twitter.com/MikeSBennett

Meet: Doug Puett is the Head of Data Science at UserTesting. UserTesting has the world’s greatest data source on how user research is done. Prior to joining UserTesting, Doug worked at a startup that was acquired by LinkedIn. He has an MS degree from Columbia and a Bachelor’s from Cornell.

What you’ll learn:

Getting the feedback cycle started early

Having a deep interest in product

Matrixed embedded data science teams

If you have any questions for Doug, please feel free to reach out to him via LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dougpuett/

Meet:  Marian manages the Experiments and Optimization team at Zymergen. She spent the last ten years building data science solutions for problems in remote sensing, epidemic modeling, weather science, ag-tech, and now in synthetic biology.

What you’ll learn:

Taking advantage of innovation

Relationships with science and product teams

Advice if you want to get into data science

If you would like to get in touch with Marian regarding anything discussed on this episode, please connect via:

https://twitter.com/bayesiangirl