Randy DeFauw

I’m an electrical engineer by training who’s been working in technology for 23 years at companies ranging from start-ups to large defense firms. A fascination with distributed consensus systems led me into the Big Data space, where I discovered a passion for analytics and machine learning. I started using AWS in my Hadoop days, where I saw how easy it was to set up large complex infrastructure, and then realized that the cloud solved some of the challenges I saw with Hadoop.

I picked up an MBA so I could learn how business leaders think and talk, and found that the ‘soft skill’ classes were some of the most interesting ones I took. Lately I’ve been picking up graph-based learning techniques, dabbling in federated learning, and helping customers with multi-region resilience designs.