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:

Growth Mindset

The Feynman Technique

Radical Candor

Trillion Dollar Coach

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Sapiens

A Short History of Nearly Everything

On Intelligence

Prediction Machines

Algorithms to Live By