A magical transition: Moving from a large company to a right-sized startup

Deciding where to land professionally is no easy task. There are many major considerations that must be made: location, compensation, the team, culture, etc. The list is endless. Kavya Tumkur, a machine learning engineer at Coactive AI, highlights how one such consideration (size) factored into her choice of where to land her professional career. Read on to find out just how enchanting she found the opportunity of joining a Series A company, especially with regard to the impact she was able to have.

Wands at the ready?

Okay, swish and flick!

Before we get truly started, Kavya, let’s see if you can finish this quote?

Uh-oh. I wasn’t told there would be a test.

You might belong in Hufflepuff….?

...where they are just and loyal, those patient Hufflepuffs are true, and unafraid of toil!

I was not expecting to have to produce a direct quote from the infamous Sorting Hat today, but that’s right up my alley.

Ah, so the rumors are true! A little birdie told me that not only are you a proud Hufflepuff, but you’ve got quite the memory.

Well, like most Hufflepuffs (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is one of us, actually), it’s taken some time for my badger-pride to break through – but yes, I am a proud member of the yellow and black house. We might not be flashy, but like the quote says, we’re true.

And, when it comes to my memory, let’s just say I’ve listened to the first audiobook so many times that I have it completely memorized. Fantastic background noise, for sure.

As a now proud Slytherin, I know a little something about needing to come to terms with where you belong. I also wonder what motivated you to bring your house’s signature characteristic of hard work over to the magical world that is machine learning and computer science?

Well that’s a bit of a story!

I grew up as an only child on the east coast in Massachusetts, where I had my very first experience with computer science as early as high school. The intensive nature of solving important and difficult logic-based problems really grabbed my attention and my heart. Although I was curious about potentially pursuing a pre-med track, once I took my first CS class as an undergrad at Johns Hopkins University I knew that this was the path for me.

I interned at Twitter focusing on both software engineering and ML, which only confirmed that I had made the right career decision. After my internship, Twitter offered me a position, which I enthusiastically accepted, and the rest is history!  

Serendipity, indeed! However, Twitter is a much different company than Coactive AI. Tell us what charmed you enough to make the transition?

You are right, there are a lot of differences between the two companies. However, when I was looking for new opportunities, a factor that was key for me and my decision to join Coactive AI was its size. After my chapter at Twitter closed, I knew that I had learned a lot as an engineer at a large company, but I realized that I wanted to be closer to the heartbeat of the action. At that stage of my career, I felt like the best way to achieve that level of intimacy with a product and company would most likely come from a smaller company.

I joined Coactive after their Series A close with the hope that I would be able to have a larger impact on my team and have more ownership over production-ready projects. There’s no doubt that I made the right decision, as the experience has truly lived up to my expectations. I am proud of the work we’re putting into the world, not just because we have a stellar game-changing product, but also because I am confident about my ability to meaningfully affect decisions from end to end of the production process. At Coactive, we’re shaping and defining the future of video and image data consumption - a largely unexplored area and my most exciting logic puzzle yet.

Wow! Tell me more about what’s most enchanting you about Coactive’s product.

Well, quite simply, what excites me most is the problem we’re solving. There’s a lot of work to be done with regard to how people are looking for patterns in text, image, and video data. Adding structure to this unstructured data is a really under-explored area that has a lot of applications.

One of the most exciting applications that Coactive is working on is being able to generate labels for unstructured data through ML modeling instead of relying on manual labeling, which can be time-consuming and costly. By providing a platform with this functionality, we are able to quickly generate labels for large datasets, helping make the data understandable and searchable for users. It’s been really fun getting to work in such an important and quickly evolving field!

And, of course, I love that the team has really embraced me and my ideas. My voice is valued.  

Speaking of feeling valued, can you pick an item from Coactive’s culture doc and tell us what about our team makes you feel like someone’s cast a cheering charm on you?

It’s definitely that “we are one team”. I’ve only recently joined, but the projects I’ve been working on so far have given me both great autonomy and everyone has been incredibly collaborative in achieving our goals.

I’m naturally inquisitive by nature, and I have never been made to feel like I should shy away from asking questions here. Instead, there is truly a culture of continuous and communal learning and growing at Coactive. I feel like my colleagues value the journey of getting the results we desire, just as much as we value the results themselves. There’s such compassion shown amongst the entire team at Coactive - that can sometimes get lost when you put a bunch of brilliant people in a room. We work together to create fuller understandings of how our product works, as well as the needs of our customers. I prize this so much, because in the words of Albus Dumbledore: “We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.”

What a perfect close to a positively bewitching interview! Thank you, Kavya, for highlighting your experience with us. We’re delighted to have you on the team!

Culture is our number one product at Coactive AI, and the first thing we launched. We pride ourselves on having a truly collaborative, diverse, and ever-learning team. We’re also the industry leaders for analyzing unstructured image data. Are you ready to join the next revolution in machine learning? Check out our job openings.