About
Our goal is to bring the benefits of AI directly to users with beautiful, human-centered design. Our products will enable humankind to experience and accomplish more in their lives without compromising on privacy.
Based in San Diego, we are a team of passionate scientists, product managers, engineers and travelers focused on leveraging AI to solve real world problems. We’ve built a company culture of mutual respect, diversity of thought, performance excellence, and immense drive to achieve our mission. Join us on our journey to create 10x better user experiences that will improve lives.
We are building our first product in the travel and leisure space. The vast amount of information and number of tools available online expand access to more travel options, but also turn travel planning into a complex, time consuming task that can feel overwhelming and tedious. Our solution assists users by distilling information, improving personalization and bringing the process of planning and booking travel to a unified place.
Team
Arjun Bansal
CEOPrior to co-founding XOKind, Arjun was a vice president in the Artificial Intelligence Products Group at Intel where he led a large AI software and research effort that spanned the United States, Israel and Poland. Arjun joined Intel after the acquisition of Nervana Systems, a company he co-founded. Nervana developed a new computational paradigm consisting of a cloud to silicon stack designed for deep learning. Nervana helped enterprises make sense of big data at scale. Arjun oversaw development of Nervana's software framework and led engagements across vertical industries, including agriculture, automotive, energy, finance, government and online services.
Before founding Nervana in 2014, Arjun worked at Qualcomm on brain-inspired computing for robotics and mobile applications. Earlier in his career, he was a postdoctoral research fellow in neurology at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital, focusing on cognitive experiments, computational modeling and quantitative analysis of large neurological data sets.
Arjun holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from Caltech and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brown. He has written more than a dozen published works on topics related to brain-machine interfaces, machine learning applied to computational neuroscience, deep learning and AI. Arjun was recently chosen as a 40 under 40 by Fortune magazine. Arjun has been invited to share his thoughts on AI and its implications for humankind at several conferences in the US, Europe and China, including Fortune Brainstorm Tech, O’Reilly AI, Re.Work, Stanford Future Fest and WebSummit, as well as Forbes publication and the Simulation show. In his free time, Arjun enjoys travel (27 countries, 25 states plus D.C. and counting!), tennis, yoga and family time in the San Diego outdoors.
Yinyin Liu
CTOYinyin is responsible for designing and building the technology roadmap to achieve the business and technology goals of XOKind. Through her years of experience in the machine learning domain, Yinyin has collaborated with CSPs and enterprises in various verticals to apply AI/Data Science to build/deploy AI systems and services, and has always been passionate about designing and packaging the right AI algorithms to solve problems for enterprises and end-users.
Previously, Yinyin was the Head of Data Science in the Artificial Intelligence Products Group at Intel where she led a global team of deep learning researchers and data scientists that is engaged in in-depth data science for AI product engineering, as well as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) research. She was responsible for setting the strategy and leading the execution of connecting data science and AI research with AI hardware, enabling AI use cases through open-source data science tools in NLP, RL, model compression, and working with Intel partners and customers on innovative AI solutions across industry domains. Yinyin has also driven algorithmic design for the Intel Nervana NNP-L, one of the first Deep learning training ASICs, and contributed to neon (open source DL framework) and nGraph (open source DL compiler). Yinyin represented Intel at the Partnership on AI, a multi-stakeholder organization that brings together around 100 academic, industry, and civil society organizations working on making AI beneficial for people and society. Prior to working at Intel, Yinyin was a Principal Data Scientist at Nervana Systems (acquired by Intel in 2016), where she was responsible for developing deep learning algorithms and frameworks, and AI solutions for enterprises. She also previously worked at Qualcomm Research as a ML/neuroscience researcher working on Deep Learning, Robotics and Neuromorphic computing.
Yinyin was named one of the 9 women in Silicon Valley to watch who are leading in AI by Silicon Valley Business Journal, and one of the top 30 Women in AI in US by RE.WORK. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University, China, and a Ph.D. focused in Machine Learning from Ohio University.
Scott Leishman
VP of EngineeringScott has over twelve years experience creating machine learning based solutions to solve large-scale, real-world problems. Prior to co-founding XOKind, Scott was a Principal Engineer in the Artificial Intelligence Products Group at Intel where he led and managed teams building systems to support deep learning on specialized hardware. Scott joined Intel via the acquisition of Nervana Systems, where he was an early employee. At Nervana, Scott led initial architecture design and was a core contributor to Nervana’s deep learning framework neon. Scott also kicked off Nervana’s cloud efforts, building one of the world’s first deep learning as a service offerings.
Over his career, Scott has contributed award-winning models, analysis and software to support automated house price valuation, securitized asset rating, and credit card fraud detection. He's had multiple top ten finishes in the KDD Cup and Kaggle competitions on tasks ranging from author disambiguation to music preference rating. Scott is a former member of the Machine Learning group at the University of Toronto. Supervised by Sam Roweis, his research focused on ways to improve optical character recognition by exploiting contextual and language-based cues.
Outside the office, Scott enjoys travelling to far-flung destinations (21 countries so far), long distance running, and craft beer.
Sarah Harris
Head of ProductSarah is passionate about positively impacting the role technology has in shaping how we live, work, think and feel. Her experience in the tech sector encompasses product management, partnerships and marketing at companies including Apple, where she focused on consumer apps on iOS, macOS and tvOS, and at HP, where she focused on enterprise hardware. Sarah holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, a PhD in Media Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a bachelor’s degree in Radio, TV and Film and International Studies from Northwestern University. During her PhD and postdoctoral fellowship, she conducted Fullbright-funded international research on Internet users’ attitudes and behaviors, and investigated how online culture is shaped by industries, governments and social networks in the offline world. Her analyses have been published in blogs, journals and publications including Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure (2015). Prior to her PhD, Sarah served in the Teach for America program, teaching in the Bronx and Chicago. She also has experience in radio production and documentary filmmaking, and she’s lived and worked abroad in Turkey and Bolivia where she picked up Turkish and Spanish. In her spare time, Sarah enjoys exploring new hikes, San Diego’s beaches, music and film, and spending time with family and friends.
Annie Devine
UI/UX DesignerAnnie is a UI/UX designer whose work spans the entire user-centered design process, from the earliest stages of user research to polished visual designs. She creates intuitive, engaging experiences that are firmly rooted in user needs.
Originally from the marketing and advertising world, Annie transitioned into the tech sector through a programming apprenticeship at a startup in Detroit, where she developed web and mobile products for small independent brands and large corporations like General Motors. While closely collaborating with designers, she built her own design acumen and perspective, and she has been working as a designer ever since, most recently at Designlab—an online design education company—and PINT, a web development agency in San Diego. Whether sketching a prototype, conducting usability tests, or honing a wireframe, she loves the collaborative and iterative process of developing impactful, elegant design solutions.
Annie holds a bachelor’s degree in Communication & Media from the University of Michigan, where she focused on cognitive science and marketing while serving as a research assistant across a variety of departments, including neuroscience, sociology and linguistics.
When she’s not designing, Annie loves traveling (16 countries so far!), baking, drawing, and exploring new restaurants and hiking spots.
Marcus Ng
Frontend Software EngineerMarcus is a mobile app developer who is passionate about making people’s lives easier and more productive through technology. He founded Amarok Technologies during his sophomore year at Stuyvesant High School in New York. Since then, he has developed and shipped highly rated iOS and Android apps for Amarok. Marcus also teaches mobile app development to thousands of students and professionals online and continues to expand and deliver new content. As an intern at WeWork Labs, Marcus designed, built, and deployed key consumer products and internal tools while also mentoring early stage startups on bringing their products to market. Marcus studied Computer Science at the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College in New York. When he’s not programming, Marcus enjoys listening to audiobooks on entrepreneurship and personal growth, playing competitive video games, and exploring new neighborhoods with his dog.
Vasanth Petlu
Backend EngineeringVasanth is a product-focused engineering leader responsible for backend engineering at XOKind.
Prior to XOKind, Vasanth was at Amazon for 7 years starting off as an engineer on its merchant payments product, and later in scaling its last mile logistics business from a 100 packages/day in the US to 1MM+/day globally through hiring and leading tech teams with an expertise in building internet-scale platforms. Vasanth studied Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo.
Outside of work, Vasanth enjoys cinema, traveling (21 countries so far), cooking and IPAs.
Ajay Deshpande
Backend EngineerAjay is a computer science graduate from the University at Buffalo. Before joining XOKind he worked at AWS EBS(Elastic Block Store), Intel AI and Persistent Systems. He has led and been a part of the design, development and maintenance of multiple highly scalable applications spanning across and at the intersection of Distributed Systems, Machine Learning and Bioinformatics.
In his free time, Ajay enjoys playing competitive video games, traveling, playing outdoor sports and he’s currently learning to play the piano.
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We’re hiring! Check out our open positions.
The Role
As a Backend Software Engineer (specific title is flexible based on seniority and areas of expertise) your primary responsibilities will be to design and implement robust, performant services supporting our mobile and web applications. You will be architecting, developing, testing, deploying, and maintaining these services in close collaboration with a small, passionate team consisting of a frontend engineer, designer, AI experts and a product manager. As an early Engineering hire, this role offers tremendous leadership and growth potential, and you will end up shaping and owning a significant portion of the codebase. Further, as a very early hire in the overall company you would own a significant equity stake and there is potential for you to influence and be involved in all aspects of the company’s activities and future direction.
Responsibilities
- Designing, implementing, testing, supporting, and documenting various containerized services written in Python/Go
- Integrating 3rd party travel supplier REST/SOAP APIs
- Designing large-scale data processing and ETL pipelines, managing and persisting state via file/object stores, databases, and caches
- Setting up instrumentation to support monitoring, logging, and tracing of network connected services
- Providing strategic input and help in setting technical direction
Requirements
- 3+ years of experience developing scalable yet performant software systems in a high level programming language like Go, Python, Java, C++
- Familiarity with modern, cloud native technologies like Kubernetes, Docker, Prometheus, Redis, Linkerd, Helm, gRPC
- Strong CS fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, OO design.
- Utilization of cloud services (DBs, object storage, message queues, API gateways, functions, VPCs) from at least one major provider like GCP or AWS
- An immense pride in your craft, a continuous growth mindset, a can-do attitude
- Strong communication and time-management skills
The Role
As a Machine Learning Engineer/Data Scientist (specific title is flexible based on the level of experience) your primary responsibilities will be to design, develop and deploy ML models to enable capabilities of our product, understand user preferences and delight users with intelligent algorithms. You will bring your expertise in AI and creative problem solving skills to tackle challenges and opportunities in defining our data and modeling strategies. You will also collaborate closely with a team of AI experts, software and platform experts, a designer, and a product manager to build the product. As an early Machine learning and Data Science hire, this role offers tremendous leadership and growth potential, and you will end up shaping and owning a significant portion of the ML algorithms. Further, as a very early hire in the overall company you would own a significant equity stake, and there is potential for you to influence and be involved with all aspects of the company’s activities and help shape its overall future.
Are you a Machine learning expert who is passionate about machine intelligence and also excited to bring ML and AI to solve problems for end-users during their decision-making and planning process? Then please get in touch!
Responsibilities
- Bring creative problem solving to the company’s technology and product development
- Develop, deploy and optimize machine learning models to enable product capabilities and improve user experience
- Develop data collection strategy, apply state-of-the-art or develop unique AI models (computer vision, natural language processing, knowledge graph etc.) for information and knowledge extraction
- Build, test and improve recommendation algorithms to surface the most relevant information and options for users
- Build, test and improve optimization and planning algorithms for the use case
- Integrate the models with various data source APIs and the backend infrastructure
- Work in close partnership with Product, Engineering and Design functions to actively and continuously identify opportunities to leverage Machine Learning to drive user engagement, understand user behavior and apply AI to delight users
Requirements
- Advanced Degree (PhD and/or Masters) in a quantitative field such as Machine Learning /AI, Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics
- 2+ years of hands-on experience with AI, ML, data science and analytics
- Familiar with latest AI research and data science advances
- Familiar with Python, ML cloud services, and various DL frameworks and ML packages
- Intellectual curiosity and desire to learn new technologies
- Excellent interpersonal skills, strong partnership and collaboration skills
The Role
As the UX/UI Designer your primary responsibilities will be to design modern, easy to use mobile and web interfaces that enable our users to discover, plan and book itineraries all from a single place. You will collaborate directly with a team of AI experts, engineers, and a product manager to build the product. We expect you to have a keen understanding of how people use their devices to research and plan travel and leisure, and experience with the latest design software and wireframe tools. The role offers tremendous potential for product impact as well as growth into broader leadership positions within the company.
Responsibilities
- Develop modern, intuitive, and engaging interactions and visual designs for mobile and web
- Design graphic user interface elements like menus, tabs and widgets, as well as navigation components like buttons and search fields
- Develop style standards on fonts, colors and images
- Create wireframes and prototypes that clearly illustrate how the app will function and look
- Make UI and UX adjustments based on team and user feedback
- Participate in the development process from definition, through design, build, test, release, and maintenance
- (A plus but not required) Depending on your interest and ability, translate your designs into front-end code
- Provide strategic thinking and leadership
Requirements
- Portfolio of design projects and proven ability to deliver high quality designs to your teams and customers
- Passion for taking complex human decisions, simplifying the steps and reducing cognitive labor
- Strong knowledge of wireframe tools (e.g. Figma, InVision, etc.) and design software (e.g. Sketch, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.)
- Strong communication and time-management skills
- Strong graphic design skills, with a good understanding of typography, intuitive layouts and palate development
- Understanding of Apple’s human interface design guidelines, Android design and other mobile platform designs, including Google’s material design
- Associate’s degree or higher in interaction design, human-computer interaction, cognitive science or another design-related field
The Role
As a Frontend Software Engineer (specific title is flexible based on seniority and areas of expertise) your primary responsibilities will be to turn wireframes and conceptual mockups into a fully-functioning and consistent reality for our end users. You will be architecting, building, testing, deploying, and maintaining, clean and well-behaved components/screens for iOS and Android devices as well as the web. You will also collaborate directly with a team of AI experts, a designer, and a product manager to build the product. As an early Engineering hire, this role offers tremendous leadership and growth potential, and you will end up shaping and owning a significant portion of the codebase. Further, as a very early hire in the overall company you would own a significant equity stake, and there is potential for you to influence and be involved with all aspects of the company’s activities and help shape its overall future.
Responsibilities
- Designing and architecting the constituent components of a modern cross-platform mobile app
- Writing the code and associated unit/integration/functional/performance tests necessary to build confidence in your implementation
- Assisting with middleware/backend service integration (interest and ability permitting)
- Prepping and validating release builds, writing corresponding documentation
- Maintaining and supporting releases post deployment
- Developing and maintaining the company website
- Providing strategic input and help in setting technical direction
Requirements
- 3+ years of experience developing complex, native mobile applications for iOS or Android using one or more of: Flutter, React Native, Dart, Swift, Kotlin
- Solid understanding of HTML, CSS, Javascript. Exposure to popular JS libraries and frameworks like React, glitter, D3, Bootstrap.
- Strong CS fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, OO design.
- Utilization of cloud services (DBs, object storage, message queues, API gateways, functions, VPCs) from at least one major provider like GCP or AWS
- An immense pride in your craft, a continuous growth mindset, a can-do attitude
- Strong communication and time-management skills
The Role
As the Digital Marketing and Growth Manager your primary responsibilities will be to increase customer acquisition, activation and retention through a combination of growth and digital marketing strategies. This includes designing and implementing innovative digital campaigns, interacting with customers via digital channels, creating and promoting interactive and engaging content, and expanding the opportunities for revenue through marketing partnerships and influencer campaigns. You will work closely with product, design, and engineering. As the first member of our team to focus on digital and growth marketing, this role offers tremendous potential for future leadership opportunities within the company.
Responsibilities
- Wear the digital and growth marketing hats within the company, to drive steady growth in user acquisition, activation and retention.
- Create and manage digital marketing campaigns and strategies, including social media budget planning, content creation, and implementation schedules.
- Ensure consistency in our marketing messages by working cross-functionally with product, engineering and design.
- Manage influencers and partner marketing campaigns.
- Collect and analyze data on customers’ interactions with our digital campaigns and unique visits to our website and app. Use this data to report progress back to the team, and to inform and adjust our marketing strategy.
- Grow our social media presence on new social media platforms as well as existing ones (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn..).
- Research and monitor competitive marketing strategies.
- Create engaging copy and graphic content for our website and social media pages, and contribute to the development of our brand’s voice.
Requirements
- At least four years of professional digital marketing experience and at least two years in a growth-focused marketing role
- Deep knowledge of social media platforms
- Proven ability to collect and analyze data to make strategic recommendations
- Strong verbal, written and visual communication skills with a strong track-record of contributions in content creation (visual and written) for web and social. Please send us samples.
- Attention to detail and creative problem solver
- Degree in Communications, Marketing or a related field
- Experience in the travel industry is a plus, but not required
- Experience in a growth-related role at a startup is a plus, but not required
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