Meet the Groundlight team!
Leo Dirac
Founder, CTO
Leo is really into machine learning, and is passionate about using it to make the world a better place. He’s been a pioneer in applying ML to solve real-world problems for over a decade. In 2012 he started using neural networks, and was one of the first deep learning engineers at Amazon, leading its application to numerous technical and business efforts including visual search, recommender systems, and multiple generations of AWS ML services from Amazon Machine Learning to SageMaker. He founded Groundlight with Avi to build the next generation of machine learning and computer vision to enable the next generation of robotics.
Avi Geiger
Founder, CEO
Avi is in it for the robots. He has a long track record of bringing barely formed ideas from concept to production and doing whatever it takes along the way, leading numerous engineering, manufacturing, and business efforts at Microsoft, Picobrew, and elsewhere. And he’s a serial founder and entrepreneur who’s always looking for new solutions to old problems.
Dr. Paulina Varshavskaya
Chief Science Officer
Paulina has lived and studied in St. Petersburg, Budapest, Vienna, London, Cambridge MA, and Edinburgh before settling in Seattle. She finished her PhD at MIT in distributed robotics, taught at Tufts, and ran the software team at an AI life sciences company identifying rare cells in microscopy images. When not directing the science effort at Groundlight, Paulina is most likely found in the mountains, sometimes alone on an alpine ridge, sometimes with her family in a camper van.
Francine Wright
Software Engineer
Francine recently graduated from Harvey Mudd College with a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics. Originally from Denver, she moved to Seattle to join the Groundlight team. She is excited about developing her skills in machine learning and using robotics and computer vision to solve real world problems. Outside of work, she enjoys board games, reading, building things, and hiking.
Tom Faulhaber
Software Engineer
Tom has worked as an engineer, manager, and consultant and he’s been building innovative software systems at every stop. At AWS, he was the original Principal Engineer leading the development of Amazon Sagemaker, AWS’s platform for ML. He has also built systems for massive geospatial-temporal big data, scientific visualization, video intelligence, ML-driven e-Commerce and cloud-based business intelligence. Tom has also been active in the broader tech community as a speaker, mentor, and contributor to projects such the Clojure programming language. A transplant to Seattle from the Bay Area, Tom can be found hiking or kayaking in the great outdoors of the Pacific Northwest, but he still obsessively follows the Warriors and 49ers.
Roxanne Oglesby
Software Engineer
Native to Seattle, Roxanne grew up spending time in the mountains and forests of the Pacific Northwest. Roxanne left home to attend Harvey Mudd College where she was the president of the prestigious Cheese Club. She also graduated with a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics. After spending some time in Spain, Roxanne is returning to Seattle to live beneath Rainier and to feed her ongoing addiction to Molly Moon’s ice cream. She is passionate about software engineering for ML and robotics. In her free time, Roxanne enjoys camping, baking, and listening to music. Ask her about her favorite backpacking spots or her thoughts on Taylor Swift’s latest album.
Sunil Kumar
ML Engineer
Sunil had just wrapped up his undergrad at Harvey Mudd when he joined Groundlight. His background in Mathematics and Computer Science led him to equal parts research and development work in NLP & CV. His ability to smoothly navigate the balance of engineering perfection and functional implementation earns him the most emojis on slack, but his gif game is a close second. When not behind a screen clearing wide swaths of the Jira board, he’s out exploring Seattle and looking for new mountains to climb or ski down.
Phillipie Motley
Director Of Operations
Phillipie ensures everything at Groundlight AI runs as smoothly as possible. He studied Finance and played football at the University of Pittsburgh, combining his analytical skills and team spirit to excel both on and off the field.Originally from Columbus, Ohio, Phillipie is a fan of many sports. Outside of work, he enjoys gaming and playing basketball, staying active and competitive in various ways. His passion for sports and teamwork translates into his professional life, where he consistently strives to optimize operations and support his colleagues.
Brandon Wada
Software Engineer
Brandon graduated Harvey Mudd in chemistry, and tied his love of machine learning and physical sciences together while studying computational chemistry at Stanford. Now, he’s further honing his computer vision skills while working with customers to make Groundlight best suit their needs. His many interests makes him an easy target for nerd sniping, whether it’s regarding books, games, or especially a puzzlehunt.
Julia Gall
Product Marketing
Manager
Julia has successfully scaled a marketing team at early stage YCombinator startup and is also a self proclaimed data nerd. She has her MBA from the University of Washington and her Master of Science in Public Health from Johns Hopkins. Having lived in Kazakhstan, Moldova, Switzerland, and Brazil, Julia is definitely comfortable with navigating uncertainty. She once adopted two cats in Kazakhstan and brought them back with her to the US, where one of the cats escaped onto the airplane (the cat was recovered and both cats are now living their best Seattle lives).
Gabi Roata
Marketing Intern
Gabi was born in Moldova but grew up 30-minutes from Seattle. Born a “Tinker”, she never let a closed door stop her from finding a way. Her passion for thinking outside-the-box and turning complex problems into simple solutions led her to attaining her BA in UX Design. Before joining Groundlight, Gabi was the jack-of-all-trades, with experience in various marketing and design roles, blending research with her creativity. When she’s not in front of a screen, Gabi enjoys experiencing and trying new things (at least once), whether that be a food place, scenic hike, travel destination, art activity, or even sky diving.
Bowen Zhao
Applied Scientist
Bowen was born in China and has now relocated to Sydney, Australia. He just received his Master's degree from the University of Washington. Bowen has been working in the research field of Natural Language Processing for more than four years. Recently, he was working towards democratizing the usage of large language models via efficiency improvements and alignment. For free time, Bowen enjoys playing all kinds of sports (especially football - and he refuses to call this sport "soccer") and poker.
Dr. Amirreza Farnoosh
Applied Scientist
Amirreza obtained his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University, specializing in unsupervised machine learning and computer vision. His research has encompassed a wide array of topics, ranging from dynamical analysis of sequential data to 3D scene understanding. He has particularly excelled in harnessing deep generative models and variational inference techniques for these specific endeavors.
Tyler Romero
ML Engineer
Tyler is a seasoned ML Engineer and Scientist who received his Master’s from Stanford and worked at Microsoft and Twitter before coming to Groundlight. While at Twitter, he conceived and shipped significant ML modeling improvements to both the Home Timeline and Conversation Ranking algorithms. Earlier in life, Tyler had ambitions of becoming a mechanical engineer, and so he spent a lot of time fabricating robots and go-karts with his friends - and he still maintains an affinity for building things in the physical world. He grew up in St. Louis and lived in many parts of the US (including Michigan, Texas, NYC, and the Bay Area) prior to settling in Seattle. On the side, Tyler enjoys playing soccer, cooking/baking, making origami, keeping up with the latest ML research, and exploring the beautiful PNW.
Sharmila Reddy Nangi
ML Scientist
Sharmila is a recent graduate from Stanford University with a Masters in Computer Science, specializing in Artificial Intelligence. She is excited about the application of technology to solve real world problems. She got interested in Machine learning during her Bachelors in IIT Kharagpur, India. Her current research interests include NLP, Deep Learning and Knowledge Graphs. Hailing from Hyderabad, she loves her Dum Biryani! Outside of work, she enjoys listening to music, yoga, painting, sports and exploring new places. She is excited to make new friends and explore the beauty of the PNW.
Tim Huff
Software Engineer
Tim is originally from Austin, but relocated to Seattle to get involved in the tech startup scene. More recently, Tim has been pursuing two masters degrees in robotics and technology innovation from UW and Tsinghua University. Tim is fluent in Chinese, which has helped him in his studies at Tsinghua. Tim’s research at Tsinghua uses computer vision to detect defects in automotive glass. At UW, he got hands-on experience with robots including a mobile picking robot called Fetch. Tim’s team programmed Fetch to autonomously navigate around a makerspace and retrieve tools. In his free time, he enjoys cycling around Lake Washington and tinkering with radio-controlled planes. Tim is excited to bring his experience to Groundlight to develop industrial applications with the Groundlight API.
Jared Randall
Design
Jared is an east coast transplant to the PNW, with roots in rural Vermont. He spent a few years in the tiny state of Rhode Island to get a design degree and then headed West, where he helped build a consultancy working on Scientific, Consumer, Industrial, and Medical product development. He's excited to help bring some very fresh advances in computer vision to a broad set of users. He refuses to be pinned down on what his favorite color is, and has a woodworking hobby that leaves absolutely no room for cars in his garage.
Corey Wood
Software Engineer
Corey is a machine learning enthusiast and PNW boomerang, having recently graduated from Brown University after growing up near Seattle. At Brown, he studied computer science and researched the relationship between language and computer vision. Corey didn’t mind New England, but he's excited to be back in a place with evergreen trees, real mountains, and his favorite local bakeries. Outside of work, Corey likes playing frisbee, maintaining his New York Times crossword puzzle streak, and (with irrational optimism) supporting the Seattle Mariners.
Daryl Hansen
Software Engineer
A Seattle native, Daryl received a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington. Since then, he’s worked at a range of companies, from Google to startups. His focus has been on web security and infrastructure, with a goal of making it easy to do the right thing. Outside of work, you might find Daryl at a local park with his son, hosting a Dungeons and Dragons game, or rowing a boat on Green Lake (but probably not all at the same time).