Episode 20
Managing Data Science Teams and Hiring Machine Learning Engineers with Harikrishna Narayanan (YC Stealth Startup)
Harikrishna Narayanan is the co-founder of a YC-backed stealth startup. He was previously a Principal Engineer at Yahoo, a Director in Workday's Machine Learning organization, and holds an M.S. from Georgia Tech.
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Timestamps:
02:45 How Hari got started in computer science and machine learning
06:00 Making the transition from IC to manager
14:35 What it means to be an effective engineering manager
19:20 Differences in managing machine learning vs traditional software teams
24:30 The importance of explaining complicated topics simply
30:15 How he thinks about hiring for data science and machine learning
36:50 Mistakes Workday made as it adopted machine learning
41:50 Essential skills for machine learning engineers
54:05 Why the future of AI is augmentation, not automation
58:30 His experience so far with YC
01:02:00 Rapid fire questions
Links:
The Hard Thing About Hard Things