How Many Jobs Has Patrick Wendell Had?

Patrick Wendell has had one job in his career. He was in graduate school at UC Berkeley in 2013, working where machine learning met big data, and then left with a few colleagues to start Databricks.

The group was scaling up classic machine learning, at a time when deep learning was not yet common, and the research sat tightly with very large data sets. If they just kept scaling, a lot of the work started to perform better, a small early version of the scaling laws happening now. They left to start Databricks, which is still around, at first around open source technology built for large-scale data and machine learning. As a founder he does not have a single role, but the day job is engineering and supporting several engineering teams.

In the last few years the same role has centered on how Databricks uses AI inside the company. For a company of that size, he thinks the internal adoption was pretty early and quite ambitious, and he has been the person most responsible for the effort. Databricks has thousands of engineers, and the aim is to give everyone AI tools and get them to be super productive.