About

I currently work on the Data Platform team at xAI and X (SpaceX), where I lead development of the batch processing platform. We power data cleaning for Grok pretraining (text and multimodal), data preparation for posttraining, product data analysis, and much more. On the X side, my team runs the infra for X ads, recommendation systems, and product analytics.

Before xAI, I worked on Tesla’s Cell Manufacturing team, where I led a team that built software to enable more efficient manufacturing operations. My team ran the data platform reponsible for factory reporting and financial tracking. I like to think that this work pulled forward the day when the world will have access to cheap, abundant energy storage.

My technical strengths include distributed data processing (Spark and Ray), analytical data systems (data lakes, ClickHouse), and data validation and verifiability. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and building systems to make data actually effective in large organizations.

I studied Chemical Engineering at UC Berkeley. I did a bit of research high-capacity, nickel-rich battery cathodes at Berkeley Lab and Tesla.

In rough terms, I hope my current work at xAI can contribute to:

  1. Making artificial intelligence trustworthy, safe, and widely accessible, and
  2. Making human life multiplanetary.

Ultimately, I hope that these projects will ultimately reduce the existential risks facing humanity and improve our chances of achieving a flourishing long-term future.

Outside of work, I’ve been spending time going deep into functional programming, type systems, testing theory, and even a bit of formal methods (particularly Lean). I’ve been working on a project to rebuild Spark core from scratch in functional Scala 3.

I’m also interested in global development, particularly how to lift out of poverty the 650 million people living on less than $2.15 per day. I’m also broadly interested in AI Alignment.