This week we had a virtual sit down with Vlad Constantinescu, our true genius who is Head of Data Science here at Getvisibility.

 What does your job entail?

I spend most of my time performing R&D in the Machine Learning / Data Science area. Superficially, this entails a generous portion of software engineering, along with constantly ingesting, routing, brokering and disseminating information on the relevant topics, discussing shorter, or longer-term goals, organising workloads, evaluating technical costs and risks and anticipating constraints on deliverables.
In reality, it’s an ongoing opportunity for me to solve challenging AI problems along with likewise minded folks 🙂

What do you like most about your job?

The way people are generous with their time if they feel they are contributing. The myriad puzzles in a typical engineering sprint. The steadfast growth of the team. The agility in front of uncertainty. The disruptive technology we’re deploying. The interesting stuff we read and discuss daily. All of these I like most at the same time.

What’s a fun fact about you many people may not know?

If there’s any problem I can’t research and code, I can probably cook my way out of it.

When you have 30 minutes of free-time, how do you pass the time?

I’m a family guy, but if they’re not around, and subject to a liberal interpretation of what “30 minutes” means, there is always gathering some friends and starting a loud flame war on some interesting or controversial topic du jour – after all the studying, the chatbot needs to be let out.

What’s your favourite indoor/outdoor activity?

It’s a tie between being around water (swimming, lounging at the beach, no fishing, though – that’s boring) and sight-seeing a new city with my family. I used to like a whole bunch of fun indoor games like pool, poker, chess, but going too deep into ML ruined those for me, because I can’t shake the feeling that we could hack together a better computer player for any of those given 24 hours. Some pizza and some coffee.🍕☕

What is the best career lesson you’ve learned so far?

That it’s important to always identify all the stakeholders, and to have a good understanding of what everybody wants. The question “what do you want [to accomplish]” is the most powerful weapon I have in my arsenal, I think. It’s the make-or-break of all ventures, because this allows one to formulate the proper objective to optimize. Then it’s all about gathering evidence, building a model of the problem, and executing gradient ascent on the model.

How would you describe the people and culture at Getvisibility?

Getvisibility is a bleeding-edge talent-centric remote-friendly tech startup, ramping up on a market dominated by giants. 💪 Having the right people at the right place, understanding the nuances of what they want to accomplish (see above), giving them room to grow as the company grows, communicating well remotely – all of these are critical to our success. Sure, everybody’s customer-focused, but we’ve carefully valued openness and empowerment within our team since the very beginning. There is just no other way, this is the spin we’ve been on since we’ve been founded. Over time, this paid out, the talent accumulated, the synergies compounded, to the point that now we have an amazingly diverse team going to work every day despite being continents and cultures apart.

What is your motto or personal mantra?

I think wisdom conquers all, and we should help it conquer. This is not just a quirky paraphrase of Virgil – ours is a world without silver bullets, without hidden all-solving truths. Problems demand their fair share of work, gathering evidence, studying, compressing and validating predictions. And after a while, the distillate of all the honest multi-task learning is (salient) wisdom, which is valuable in itself.

If you could have any superpower what would it be?

I never have enough time. The ability to award to anyone a few more hours to their day, a few more days to their week, a few more weeks to their year and a few more years to their life would be really nice.⏳