Julaiti Alafate

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I am building a startup in San Francisco. I'm interested in agent orchestration and continual learning.

Before getting into entrepreneurship, I was a staff research scientist at Meta. I spent a bit over five years working on Instagram's ads system, focusing on system and ML optimizations. I worked on ranking, delivery infra, and auction systems. I worked on two 0-to-1 projects during my time at Meta, and found that's the sweet spot I like to work in.

I came to the US for grad school in 2014. I got my PhD in machine learning at UC San Diego, advised by Yoav Freund. My research focused on improving the efficiency of boosting algorithms. I implemented a very fast boosting variant in Rust called Sparrow.

I got obsessed with programming and optimization at age 13 and was very into competitive programming.