Employee Spotlight – A Q&A with LandingAI Software Engineers on Building Innovative AI Products

At LandingAI, we are building next generation AI products and solutions to help transform traditional industries like manufacturing and agriculture. This is an ambitious goal that requires close collaboration between people from different disciplines, including product, machine learning engineers and software engineers. In this blog post, we talk with some of our software engineers, who play an important role in building and executing AI solutions, to get their perspectives on what a software engineer’s work life is like at LandingAI.

(Aldrin Leal, Rustam Hashimov and Pingyang He)

What is it like working as a SDE at LandingAI? What’s your typical day look like?

Pingyang: Besides designing and building various kinds of innovative systems and solutions, I have also been spending a lot of my time learning new things that I was not able to learn elsewhere. I got more opportunities to build tools and frameworks that I’m not allowed to touch or modify in big companies. Other than that, I also get to interact with inspiring leaders in the company every day.

Aldrin: To me, it is awesome because it is an opportunity to be part of a diverse team. Some days it’s purely hard, passionate coding. Other days involve the team coming over to my lab to investigate and sample some hardware or helping TPMs implement adequate monitoring and metrics for an onsite deployment.

Rustam: LandingAI is a very fast-paced company. We value the importance of quick decision making. As an engineering manager, my typical day involves brainstorming sessions, and design discussions with other engineers, PMs, UI/UX designers and the business team.

What got you interested in AI?

Pingyang: Back in college, I was working on a Natural Language Processing project and won second prize in a hackathon. I was really amazed with what AI could do and how it can change the way we interact with the world.

Aldrin: I enrolled in a Machine Learning class in college and it was a great eye-opening experience for me.

Diego: As an engineer, I like to solve problems in the best possible way. I think AI/ML is a very important skill that, as an engineer, I must have to solve challenging problems. For years, I have been interested in AI/ML, so I have pursued online courses and have been reading educational books and papers.

What do you like most about your job? What is the most exciting/interesting part of your job?

Aldrin: The company offers a lot of freedom, trust and openness. What I find most exciting is that things we do here are very cutting edge. I’m learning a lot every day.

Diego: At LandingAI, I work on solving problems that are completely new to me. There are amazing challenges that sharpen my skills and I have the opportunity to work with very smart people. This is a company where everyone is eager to learn new skills and solve challenging problems.

Rustam: Definitely the team! I really enjoy working with passionate, smart people who love to learn and apply their learning. I also love building AI for new frontiers like manufacturing.

What does collaboration look like between software engineers and machine learning, business or product teams?

Pingyang: Everyone in the company shares the same goal, so collaboration is quite smooth between every team.

Aldrin: Over the past two days alone, I’ve worked with the product team on some projects as well as helped the ML engineers pick the right OS / Hardware / Driver integrations for a project. LandingAI has a very open culture that encourages people on different teams to collaborate with each other.

Diego: Our teams are very diverse with people from different backgrounds. I work with machine learning engineers and try to solve problems together. We combine our points of view to find the best possible solution.

Rustam: We are a small group of people who share the same passion for the work we do. We work closely with other disciplines to get every perspective and incorporate each of them into our work.

Why did you decide to join LandingAI?

Pingyang: AI will become the utility of the world, like electricity. In the future, I can see that we will be helping many businesses to boost their productivity and reduce cost. It’s very exciting to be part of this innovation.

Diego: I am interested in working on projects related to AI and LandingAI is a company that is moving fast in this field. It has AI / ML in its DNA and is working on interesting projects in multiple industries.

Rustam: LandingAI is aiming to bring AI to traditional industries. I share LandingAI’s vision and wanted to be part of this journey.