Rajiv Sambasivan

rajiv_50_circ.png

I am a data scientist. Briefly, here is a career summary:

  • My first foray into programming was at graduate school. I have a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering. I did numerical programming work and by a quirk of fate stumbled into software development.
  • I stayed in software development for two decades. Along the way I did some technical management work but pivoted back to purely technical work – so while I have worked with a “people and process” focus (I even had some certs :-)), I am largely a technical guy.
  • I have worked in a range of application domains: transportation, retail, government services, financial services and telecommunication.
  • The first 10 years of my professional career were focussed on enterprise software development and the last 15 years or so have been data focused. The last 10 years have been almost exclusively machine learning focussed.
  • I went back to school part-time to get a Master’s in data science to develop the skills I wanted to get.
  • A family situation made me relocate to Chennai, India, after living in the US for nearly two decades.
  • By this time I was really, really interested in machine learning – like wanting to do a PhD interested :-).
  • My research for my PhD focussed on the problems encountered while working and that both frustrated me as well as engrossed me.
  • Starting a PhD at 43 must sound crazy (and it sorta is) but must give you a sense of how much I enjoy data related work and research. I have a different background and an unconventional path to ML work, but I do think my experience in developing enterprise grade software for a diverse set of domains gives me a unique perspective in ML research for enterprise applications. If you are a researcher and you think we can collaborate, I would be delighted to hear from you. This is one of my motivations for putting this page up.
  • Most recently, my work has been focussed on graph machine learning and building machine learning task abstractions for performing graph machine learning on a machine learning platform. I lead the machine learning platform engineering team (Head of Machine Learning Plaform Engineering) at ArangoDB.
  • I am now looking for remote consulting projects.