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

Multipliers

Good to Great

The First 90 Days

Crossing the Chasm

Zero to One

The Lean Startup

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Sapiens

A Short History of Nearly Everything

On Intelligence

Prediction Machines

Algorithms to Live By

The Synthetic Data Vault