About Yanir: Startup Data & AI Consultant

With over a decade of experience across various data and engineering roles, the main theme of my career has been bringing data-intensive applications to production. This has included anything from solving isolated data problems to building systems that serve millions of users. With a proven capability to work independently and in teams, lead and mentor colleagues, and communicate with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, my focus is always on delivering business value.

My experience and formal education fall under three key areas:

• software engineering (15+ years; Computer Science BSc)
• data science / engineering (10+ years; Artificial Intelligence PhD)
• tech leadership (5+ years with startups and scaleups)

🐳 My current mission is to help climate and nature tech startups grow and scale successfully with Data/AI/ML. See my consulting page for details, or head directly to my contact page if you have a problem you want to discuss.

Testimonials

Here are some key quotes from people I’ve worked with, including leaders at big tech companies, startups, and scaleups. See the Recommendations section of my LinkedIn profile for attribution and further details.

Yanir is that rare data/AI practitioner who combines deep experience in data science with breadth in software engineering and experience working with marketing and product teams. This vastly increases the success rate of data/AI projects that he’s involved with.

Yanir has the rare qualities of being (a) very good with data and (b) very able to express his opinions – especially when he doesn’t agree with how something is being done. His unwavering focus on the quality and efficiency of the development process has transformed the platform and team itself.

Yanir is an exceptional data scientist with the rare combination of data science expertise and strong software engineering principles. He is a strategic thinker and problem solver, adept at identifying root causes and implementing engineering solutions.

I’d recommend Yanir any day if you are looking for someone who can execute thoughtfully and leave no stone unturned.

Yanir’s proactivity, creativity and high quality of work have been invaluable to our organisation. I strongly recommend Yanir to anyone looking to implement data & AI projects.

In addition to taking (and excelling at) ownership of the entire data segment of the company, he also accepted key responsibilities within the vision setting, goal setting, and fund raising parts of the business.

He is the single most talented person I’ve had the opportunity to work with in my nearly 15 years in Data/ML.

Yanir is a fantastic engineer.

Yanir practically s**** beautiful code.

Past work examples

Let’s go deeper with a few highlights from my work:

• Building production systems that serve millions of users. In my work with Automattic, I re-architected and led the implementation of the company’s unified online experimentation platform, and co-led the implementation of machine learning pipelines that had a significant impact on revenue from marketing campaigns.
• Solving isolated data & machine learning problems. I’m a retired Kaggle competition master, having ranked in the top ten of the five competitions I participated in. I’ve also worked on various other problems throughout my career, but many of them haven’t resulted in public artefacts – such is the nature of commercial data.
• Software engineering and programming expertise. My undergraduate degree was in computer science, with a focus on software engineering. I graduated first in class from the Technion – a top Israeli university. My early career included software engineering work with big tech companies (Intel, Qualcomm, and Google). I chose to work with startups after my PhD, before joining a unicorn scaleup (Automattic), and then returning to the startup and freelancing worlds. All my roles included a substantial hands-on coding component. I take software engineering seriously and strive to keep on top of and apply best practices, as solid software is the foundation of all data work.
• Artificial intelligence and data science expertise. In my PhD I formally specialised in artificial intelligence. As the term artificial intelligence was falling out of favour when I submitted my thesis in 2012, I also say that my PhD is in data science (which was decreasing in popularity a decade later). Either way, it resulted in some publications in top venues and won an award for the best thesis in my faculty at Monash – a leading Australian university. Personally, I don’t think it’s a big deal, but people seem to love PhDs and other credentials! Since my PhD, I’ve continued learning and honing my skills, as reflected by posts on this site and my LinkedIn profile.

Outcomes beat job titles

One of the downsides of working in an ever-changing field and accumulating a broad range of experiences is that it’s hard to summarise with a concise title. For example, being a data scientist used to imply having strong software engineering skills, but this has changed over time. It’s a similar story with the decline and rise of artificial intelligence. In an ideal world, I’d be able to let my work speak for itself. In our world, people search for keywords and have different understandings of concepts, e.g., they may want “an AI solution” to a problem that can be solved with deterministic software engineering. Or they may believe they need an AI Engineer rather than a Data Scientist, when a few years ago it’d have been the opposite (as I’m writing this in 2023, you could replace the words data science with artificial intelligence across my historical posts and much of what I wrote would still hold).

Anyway, whether you’re trying to navigate Data & AI terminology or solve specific problems, I can probably help. My aim is to get to the root of business problems and iteratively implement pragmatic solutions. The taxonomy of Data & AI professionals is only relevant if I’m helping you hire a team.