7. Serkan Piantino - From Facebook to startups: data science is becoming an engineering problem
Towards Data Science
10/01/19
•39m
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For today’s podcast, we spoke with someone who is laser-focused on considering this second possibility: the idea that data science is becoming an engineer’s game. Serkan Piantino served as the Director of Engineering for Facebook AI Research, and now runs machine learning infrastructure startup Spell. Their goal is to make dev tools for data scientists that make it as easy to train models on the cloud as it is to train them locally. That experience, combined with his time at Facebook, have given him a unique perspective on the engineering best practices that data scientists should use, and the future of the field as a whole.
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6. Jay Feng - Data science in the startup world
September 25, 2019
•45m
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: “data science” is an ambiguous job title. People use the term to refer to data science, data engineering, machine learning engineering and analytics roles, and that’s bad enough. But worse still, being a “data scientist” means completely different things depending on the scale and stage of the company you’re working at. A data scientist at a small startup might have almost nothing in common with a data scientist at a massive enterprise company, for example.
So today, we decided to talk to someone who’s seen data science at both scales. Jay Feng started his career working in analytics and data science at Jobr, which was acquired by Monster.com (which was itself acquired by an even bigger company). Among many other things, his story sheds light on a question that you might not have thought about before: what happens to data scientists when their company gets acquired?
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8. George Hayward: comedian, lawyer and data scientist
October 8, 2019
•51m
Each week, I have dozens of conversations with people who are trying to break into data science. The main topic of the conversations varies, but it’s rare that I walk away without getting a question like, “Do you think I have a shot in data science given my unusual background in [finance/physics/stats/economics/etc]?”.
From now on, my answer to that question will be to point them to today’s guest, George John Jordan Thomas Aquinas Hayward.
George [names omitted] Hayward’s data science career is a testament to the power of branding and storytelling. After completing a JD/MBA at Stanford and reaching top-ranked status in Hackerrank’s SQL challenges, he went on to work on contract for a startup at Google, and subsequently for a number of other companies. Now, you might be tempted to ask how comedy and law could possibly lead to a data science career.
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