Half Man, Half Machine Learning Engineer (Jeff Charbeneau) - KNN Ep. 18

In this episode I had the pleasure of speaking with Jeff Charbeneau. Jeff is a friend of mine from Chicago, who works on the machine learning engineer side of data science. He is probably one of the most passionate people about machine learning pipelines and ml ops out of anyone I know. Jeff's road to the present began in statistics.

After several years in academia, first as a biostatistics graduate student, then as a staff biostatistican, he left to do quantitative things at a now defunct intellectual property startup. Next came data science consulting using crowdsourcing (don't do it). Then things got really interesting when he started working with software engineering teams.

Over time, he developed a passion for building things that work and automating them and came to view well-engineered infrastructure as often needing to precede higher level efforts like data science, machine learning, so-called artificial intelligence, etc. He thinks Prefect is incredibly interesting and has compared it to Airflow here.