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3y
+1 to what Shri said . Call from you changed many lives . Thank you and Wish you the best Joseph
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Durga Rajaram reacted on thisDurga Rajaram reacted on thisMy birthday was last weekend. It also happened to be 2 years, to the day, since I left Notion. Looking back, I have even more respect for Ivan and for how rare early Notion was: the care, the talent, and the culture of going above and beyond. Everyone spiked in some way, but the company created an environment where all of us could thrive. That combination isn’t the default. A few weeks ago, I left Braintrust and deliberately chose not to take another full-time job. AI has meaningfully changed a lot of people’s jobs in the past few months. What it changed most for me is how I think about my “career path”: I’ve realized I’m a builder at heart, and I’d rather be a generalist than be defined by a specific title. It also raised the bar I hold myself to: stay curious, choose environments where I can thrive, and keep reevaluating where I spend my most precious energy. Earlier this year, I started imagining a different kind of working life: one organized around people I admire and problems that matter, building with people who help me grow, connecting Asia and Silicon Valley, and helping ambitious teams and kind people succeed. Right now, that looks like: 🪴 Fractional Head of Growth at Hilbert, helping multiple companies grow on shared foundations, grounded in the belief that growth analytics can be standardized, a thesis that inspired the Growth Data Analytics Playbook I launched last year. 🖥️ Interim special projects at a stealth neocloud company, building from the ground up with my lifelong friends. Yes, I talk in megawatts now. 🫶 Expanded my advisory work to support more brilliant 0→1 founders across billing infrastructure, healthcare, and developer tools with their GTM 🌎 GM behind AI Engineer Shanghai (Nov 5-6th), working with swyx & Yuzheng to create real exchange between the world’s two most important AI ecosystems. On paper, those are separate projects. To me, they’re one: learning the AI stack by building, and connecting the people around it. I’m grateful to the small circle of friends who know what I want and send the right opportunities my way; to the founders who would love to work with me full-time but never pushed, and instead got creative about how we could work together; and to the VC friends who help me think through companies across the AI stack. Eventually, one problem may become important enough to consume me. Until then, I want to work with people I admire on things that matter, and create environments that don’t just hire the best people, but help them become better people (Stealing that last part from Yuan) Several of the companies I work with are hiring or looking for design partners across AI compute, inference infrastructure, billing, databases, and physical AI. I’ll put the specifics in the comments. If you’re on a similar path: rethinking your career, becoming more of a generalist, building in this world, or you want to join us in Shanghai, send me a message. I’d love to hear from you 💜
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Durga Rajaram liked thisDurga Rajaram liked thisWhat a night 🙌 Thank you to everyone who came out to the Data Engineer Things meetup at the OpenAI office on Wednesday! It was truly something special to witness close to 150 attendees filling the room and strangers falling into conversation within minutes. Paul Ellwood kicked us off for the evening, Shae A. dug into Codex voice features, Pradnesh Patil walked us through building agent harnesses, Cristian Orellana showed how agents and critical-path analysis can catch delays before they threaten your SLAs, and Vikram Koka closed us out on feeding rulebooks into agents for common remediation patterns. Each of them shared not just what they've built, but the paths that got them there and the lessons they picked up along the way. Hearing those journeys and takeaways was the heart of the evening. And the room gave it right back. The Q&A went deep, the hands kept going up, and the conversations spilled into the hallway long after. That's exactly what we hope for. Huge thanks to Xinran Waibel, David Sasaki, and the OpenAI team for sponsoring and hosting us, and to Zhenni Wu from PuppyGraph for supporting the event logistics. Check out our highlight reel from the event (ft. the PuppyGraph team pic with the iconic OpenAI logo 📸🐾) P.S. Couldn't make it for this one? We're heading to the LinkedIn office in September. Come hang out with us, we'd genuinely love to see you there. #DataEngineering #DET #Meetup
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Durga Rajaram reacted on thisDurga Rajaram reacted on thisThis past weekend was a special milestone for our family as we dropped off our son Abhinav at Carnegie Mellon University as he begins a new chapter. He’ll be studying Statistics and Machine Learning, and we couldn’t be prouder of him. It was definitely bittersweet seeing him head off on his own, but we’re also very excited to see where this journey takes him as he charts his own path.
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Durga Rajaram liked thisDurga Rajaram liked thisAfter more than a decade at Meta, I’ve made the bittersweet decision to move on to my next adventure. Saying goodbye to this incredible company and my amazing colleagues has been really difficult, but I leave with a heart full of gratitude and excitement about what lies ahead. I joined Meta when we had just about 300 employees in Singapore. The landscape looked so different in 2016 - everyone was talking about digital transformation. And we were right in the midst of it - helping startups, companies, creators and the ecosystem grow across the region while delivering great experiences for our hundreds of millions of our users. While the team has grown and our products have evolved, our unwavering commitment to delivering the best for our clients has remained constant. Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of working across sectors like ecommerce and gaming in APAC, and leading talented teams across India and Southeast Asia. Throughout this journey, I’ve been fueled by the belief that our work brings meaningful connections to people and businesses worldwide. It's been an emotional day. I shared with my teams today that I am extraordinarily proud of how they've shown up everyday, doing the best work they can in an industry that is rapidly evolving. I’m proud of the work we’ve done together - be the millions of people using government citizen services on WA in India or the millions of small businesses in Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand who opened their storefronts on our apps or helping startups become unicorns in Singapore, Malaysia and Philippines….the stories are many and I am incredibly proud of everything we’ve built together More than anything, I will miss the people. The teams I’ve worked with are nothing short of exceptional and have made this an incredible ride. To businesses, ecosystem partners, non profits, creators I've worked with - thank you for trusting us and partnering with us. I’m grateful to Benjamin Joe Dan Neary Nicola Mendelsohn CBE Javier Olivan Santosh Janardhan Alex Schultz John Hegeman for your support, guidance, and partnership. There are so many Metamates - past and present, to thank and I look forward to connecting with them. To every colleague who has made this experience so special: thank you for being part of my journey. The biggest thank you is for my family - Amit Ray and Siddharth Ray for being so supportive all these years. After a short break, I’m looking forward to my next exciting chapter - will share more on that soon!
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Durga Rajaram reacted on thisDurga Rajaram reacted on thisI'm excited to share that I'm joining OpenAI as a Member of Technical Staff, focused on Trust & Safety, reporting to Paul Ellwood, who leads Data Engineering. I start next week. Huge thanks to my friend Gabriel, who kept pushing me to seriously consider OpenAI. A first conversation with Paul turned into a full interview loop, a visit to the office, and ultimately signing the offer. Although I left Meta two months ago intending to take a break, I was drawn in immediately. Coming from a Privacy background, working on Trust & Safety and Integrity at this moment feels deeply meaningful. There is a lot to solve, and the team is moving fast. I’m especially excited to help rethink the Data Engineering craft for a world where agents let us build faster and reshape workflows to be more autonomous and AI-native. Paul and David Sasaki, who leads Analytics, have built a fantastic team with a lot to learn from. Thanks also to my recruiters, Kristen and Omari, for being so diligent and accommodating throughout. I’m excited to start building alongside DE OGs and former Meta colleagues Bryan and Bharat, and to reconnect with Yihong, Mahesh, Flynn, and many others already there. It is time to crank up the intensity again :-)
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Durga Rajaram reacted on thisDurga Rajaram reacted on thisWhich is better, Meta or Google? I’m asked this a lot, since I spent many years at both of these tech giants. I assumed that both would have similar cultures but it turns out they’re actually radically different. When I was at Google (2008 to 2017) it was very much an engineering driven company. Products emerged from engineers solving complex and novel engineering problems. Engineers had lots of latitude to spend time tinkering and experimenting. The famed “20% time” was still very much a thing during my tenure. Many products and features emerged from this, but there were also many dead ends - work that went nowhere and products that died a quick death. Underneath it all, was an engineering rigor that’s likely unmatched anywhere else. Meta on the other hand, had great engineers but was still very much a product driven company. Everything started and ended with what needed to be shipped to users. This led to a company in which pretty much every employee could trace a direct (and short) line from their work to the product which ended up in the hands of users. This intense focus allowed Meta to execute like no other company. On the flip side, individual innovation was much more difficult, because even innovative work had to be clearly directed towards those ultimate user outcomes. So which culture was best? Well, at Ping I’ve tried to combine the best of both. Meta’s laser focus on user outcomes, and the unmatched execution which comes from that, is a superpower. Every person on the team needs to be able to connect their work to something the user touches. Every day, as a team, we list our priorities, and we ditch the things that are nice for us, but less meaningful for users. But we’re also building in a moment where AI is moving so fast, that we can’t always know what that final form product might look like. Intentional space for exploration goes from nice-to-have to essential. It’s too easy now to build the wrong thing. And that leads to the second trap: coding agents make it just as easy to build the right thing, badly. Moving with speed requires standards, and holding yourself and your team accountable with real engineering rigor is more critical than ever. If you’re thinking about what AI native team structures might look like - hit me up, I’d love to compare notes!
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Durga Rajaram liked thisSharing my first podcast. I appear to have made it through without visible injury 😄 Genuinely grateful to Tristan Handy being such a gracious host. I came in not quite knowing what to expect, and he made it feel like a conversation rather than an interview. He made the whole thing easy. One confession on Schematize. I was perhaps less expressive than I should have been. Typing is only part of the story. What enabled it was a primitive called DataSet, as part of the principle of schema-in-code for the warehouse. DataSet was a file checked in alongside the business logic, which became the source of truth for the schema itself. Through it, a table's schema and definition were versioned and reviewed like any other code. Combined with a unified catalog, that's what unlocked semantic understanding i.e. the ability to annotate logical types (user_id: DatingUserID) rather than physical ones (user_id: BIGINT), and rich annotations and metadata at the table and sub-column level. Privacy enforcement compiled directly from those annotations, with policies written against the meaning of columns rather than against their names. It also became the foundation the semantic layer for AI now sits on. We didn't build it for that. But governed context for agents needs exactly what privacy needed: a place where the meaning of data lives, versioned, and close to the code. That sequencing is the part I'd underline. Schematize, then Unify, then Semantics. Beyond that, the conversation went really well — especially the tangent on Indic and analytic philosophy, which was so much fun 😀 https://lnkd.in/gJjyUpgEDurga Rajaram liked thisYou almost never delete a column at Meta. Except once, when it saved a few million dollars. Shridhar Iyer is this week's guest on The Analytics Engineering Podcast. He spent 13 years inside Meta's data org, most recently as Senior Tech Lead and Director for AI and the data stack, and joined Tristan Handy to unpack a decade of lessons. Three ideas from the episode: 🔸 At Meta scale, deleting a column is a company-wide event. Sri once truncated a debug column called Extra and saved a few million dollars. But on core tables, you never delete or truncate. You create a new version, migrate people over with tooling, and just stop populating the old one. 🔸 Meta's real advantage was building abstractions in layers. Schematize first, enforcing strong types all the way up to the log statement. Unify next, one compiler and language across Spark and Presto, one catalog where every table and column is a typed asset with a URI. Only then do semantic and knowledge layers for AI become possible. Sri thinks most companies are behind on this sequence. 🔸 Becoming AI-native takes two steps, and most teams skip the first. Step one is AI-readiness: take a single workflow, learn to run it well, extract reusable primitives, and figure out the lowest-cost way to use agents with real guardrails. Skip that and you burn tokens for bad outcomes. Step two is reorganizing around three archetypes: the builder who automates workflows, the forward-deployment engineer who makes environments AI-ready, and the domain specialist embedded in a product. Listen wherever you get your podcasts 🎧The Analytics Engineering Podcast: Data lessons from inside Meta (Shridhar Iyer)The Analytics Engineering Podcast: Data lessons from inside Meta (Shridhar Iyer)
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Durga Rajaram reacted on thisDurga Rajaram reacted on thisYou can pay infinite money to hire the “best engineers” but you can’t pay engineers to care. That said, when you do find engineers who care, reward them. Because if you lose those people, you’re screwed.
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Durga Rajaram liked thisDurga Rajaram liked thisExcited to welcome Kunal Shah as the new leader of WhatsApp! Kunal will oversee one of the world's most widely used platforms, trusted by more than 3 billion people every day to stay connected, do business, and build community. Asia Pacific is at the heart of WhatsApp’s growth story, with many of its largest and most innovative markets shaping the future of messaging, business engagement, and digital services. Kunal’s leadership will be invaluable as we continue to grow, innovate, and serve our partners and communities. Looking forward to working together, and excited to see the impact of WhatsApp's next chapter in the region! Thank you, Will Cathcart, for your leadership in ensuring WhatsApp continued to innovate thoughtfully while remaining true to the simplicity, privacy, and reliability that users value most. https://lnkd.in/gWJi8Jbh
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