The Tech Trek

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 Opt...

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 h...

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 pape...

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 hi...

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://...

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 embedd...

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 li...

Meet: Xin Heng is currently the VP/Head of Data at Punchh. Before joining Punchh, he was the Head of Data Science at StubHub and a Data Science Manager at Uber. He has his Ph. D. in Applied Physics, Electrical Engineering from Caltech. What you’ll learn: Machine Learning Software Development - the differences between building ML software for B2B and B2C companies The Value of AI - predictivity vs...

Meet:  Arkadiy is Head of Application & Infrastructure Security at Chime. He is passionate about all forms of digital harm reduction, ranging from technical, to policy & legal, to security management & leadership. What you’ll learn: Establishing a security champion and culture Developers make for great security engineers Learning lessons from launching his own product If you would...

Meet:  Rick Medina is a security practitioner, OSINT junkie, button pusher, and checkbox un-checker What you’ll learn: Dealing with Covid’s impact on security within the retail space Security becoming more agile If you would like to get in touch with Rick regarding anything discussed on this episode, please connect via: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricardomedinajr/

Meet: Kyle is a CISO and VP, Security, Privacy, and Compliance. He has 18 years of establishing, growing, and leading Security and Software Engineering Teams that built security in consumer, enterprise, and SaaS software products. What you’ll learn: Bootstrapping a security program Security policy as code Starting point to move to shift security left If you have any questions for Kyle, please feel...

Meet:  Ken is the data engineering manager at Alto Pharmacy - which offers free, same-day medication delivery to customers.   Alto's data engineering team supports the entire business with a large focus on improving the logistical efficiency of the organization. Ken's career has focused on data engineering in which he has held a variety of roles in management,  data engineering...

Meet: Prior to LeafLink, Nikhil led the data science function for Gartner’s Marketing practice, gaining deep expertise in building scaled data products for large consumer brands. He has extensive experience in generating insights from e-commerce, search and transactional data leveraging experimentation, machine learning, and implementing business intelligence solutions. Nikhil has also held positi...

Meet: Nachi is a Director of Engineering at Electric. AI. Having started his career building software at a large investment bank, he has since transitioned into working for startups based out of NYC. He enjoys the role of being an early technology hire and is passionate about building inclusive & diverse engineering cultures, strong agile practices, and delighting customers. Topic: Empowering...

Meet: Kunal Bhattacharya is a Security Leader, Organization builder, and mentor who helps organizations build robust Cyberdefense and detection capabilities. He does this by building Secure SDL processes and machination encapsulating Shift left strategy, SecDevOps, Cloud, and Penetration testing. Kunal's prior experience in all phases of application development, System and database administration,...

Meet: Chris Millikin is the Head of Infrastructure and Security at Nuna. Prior to Nuna, Chris spent over a decade building security engineering teams focused on detection, response, and security by design at Google as well as Alphabet’s Security “bet”, Chronicle Security.  Chris is passionate about building strong teams and developing them to their full potential and is currently hiring passi...

Meet: Ben is a Senior Director of Software Engineering at Flatiron Health, where he leads the Machine Learning Team. Prior to Flatiron, he worked at Google on NLP applications for Google Search. He has a Ph. D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington. What you’ll learn: The impact of machine learning in healthcare data Solving text classification problems Can machine learning be over...

Meet: Joel Anderson has worked in cybersecurity and IT as an engineer, advisor, and executive with impact across public, private, and social sectors: - technology leader for over 15 years - strong focus on information security and emerging technologies - agile, proven strategic thinker/thought leader relating technology to business value - experienced leading global teams What you’ll learn: CI/CD...

Meet: Ella Alkalay Schreiber, Head of Pricing and Recommendations she leads a cross-functional team of product managers, data scientists, designers, and engineers in the creation of data-driven fintech products that make travel planning easier, most notably our Price Freeze product. These services leverage our immense first and third-party data to create products and values that do not exist elsew...

Meet: Wen-Ying is helping revolutionize how data insights can be turned into accelerators for strengthened growth at Plastiq. She has been a leader and champion of analytics and science in both start-up and corporate environments, including LendingClub, Mercari, GREE, Storm8, and eBay. What you’ll learn: Impact - address impact, to the business, to yourself to drive results Project Management - wo...

Meet: Sen Xu is the head of engineering at Replica, where he leads the engineering effort to build a scalable data solution to provide movement insights. Prior to Replica, he was at Lyft's self-driving division, Uber, Twitter, and cofounded his own startups in the commodity trading industry. What you’ll learn: Moving forward from activities and processes that don’t scale 4 main pillars of engineer...

Meet: Anjali Samani is a Director of Data Science at Salesforce. When we recorded this episode, she was leading the Predictive Modelling team at CircleUp. Anjali has extensive experience in managing and delivering commercial data science projects and has worked with senior decision-makers in startups, Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 businesses, and public sector organizations in the UK a...

Meet: Allen Ko is a data science manager working at States Title, where he's leading the company's efforts to automate document processing and parsing. He has a bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering and loves to spend his free time hiking and wandering in the outdoors. What you’ll learn: Transitioning to the data industry via Metis Stepping up to a manager role More integration with the produc...

Meet: Connan has a strong background in Economics with his Ph. D. and has also taught at UCLA as a professor. He was a Data Scientist at Uber for over 4 years before taking over the Data Science team at Just Auto Insurance. What you’ll learn: Hiring for your Data team - a balanced team for success Future of Data Scientists - evolving requirements and technical skills Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)...

Meet: Anson Whitmer - Head of Data. After completing a Ph. D., then a post-doc at Stanford, in cognitive neuroscience, Anson transitioned into data science.   He is now the director of data at Calm, a company that he help build up, as the first data hire, to its current unicorn+ status What you’ll learn: Fueling growth by discovering a new uses case for a product Employe number 10 and fi...