The Cool Geeks Behind the Data Science Team

Okay. We’ve been talking about how amazing it is being a part of GOJEK’s Data Science team. Now, it’s time for you to meet some of the team members😉

Captain Syafri Bahar

Syafri Bahar is GOJEK’s VP of Data Science and he was also among few Indonesians who participated in the International Math Olympiad (IMO). His favorite things in the world include numbers, formulas, and algorithms. He indeed is a huge Math geek and he isn’t afraid to show it. Syafri is the kind of person who “doodles” Math formulas in a notebook during his idle time (but seriously, who does that?)

Syafri might be a huge Math geek, but when he’s not busy calculating formulas and algorithms, he likes to do fun things, such as cooking, magic tricks, salsa & hip-hop dancing, and he’s a big fan of arts. He channels his love of arts by performing at various poetry readings when he’s still not busy leading a team full of data scientists at GOJEK.

Prior to joining GOJEK, Syafri lived in the Netherlands for 9 years and worked as a Quant, which is data science applied to a specific application, and in his case it was finance. He literally worked as a Data Scientist before the term “Data Science” was famous. This makes him stand among the “village elders” of Data Science in Indonesia.

On a rainy night in Utrecht, he brought himself to LinkedIn. He was scrolling through the homepage and when he came across a video of Nadiem Makarim talking about the social impact GOJEK has created to elevate millions of Indonesians’ lives. He didn’t know that there was a big digital movement going on here.

That life-changing night encouraged him to pack his bag and come back to Indonesia for good and eventually joined GOJEK to do something meaningful for his home country. His personal mission to spread the word that being a math geek is a super awesome persona because all the formulas you only got to do on paper at school can be applied to machine learning in the future, and Syafri is living proof of these #infiniteopportunities.

Ardya Dipta

Ardya Dipta is a full-time Senior Data Scientist at GOJEK and a part-time scuba diver. Even though he’s a bit geeky when it comes to robotics and machine-learning, he’s a (self-proclaimed) cool guy — the Data Science team can second that.

During his final year at Carnegie Mellon University where he took his master’s degree in Robotics, his love for robotics brought him to develop a maintenance robot for a spacecraft for his thesis that can help astronauts during their deep space explorations.

Years after his graduation, he worked with a super secret Japanese automotive company to develop a driverless car! — this is a piece of classified information, guys — With these experiences, we know we had to snatch Dipta as one of our Data Scientist before Elon Musk offered him to join his team to develop Tesla.

One fine day in Pittsburgh, USA, he realized that his previous work can’t extend beyond cool technology usage. He believes that his work should be impactful for other people and the perfect place to do it is Indonesia.

Craving for a social impact that can be created through his work, Dipta went back to Jakarta in 2016 during the rise of Unicorn start-up companies. He fell in love with GOJEK’s Data Science team because it contains the kind of brilliant people that he loves to work with. The team is his eternal love, the Leia Organa to his Han Solo.

Ridlo Nur Rahman

Ridlo Nur Rahman’s journey as Data Scientist started from his soft spot for robots. He is fascinated by how algorithms and statistical models can be used to make a computer perform a specific task without actually giving particular instruction.

It was this passion that drove him to take machine learning as specialization when he was a computer science graduate student at The University of Edinburgh through the LPDP program, a prestigious scholarship funded the Indonesian Ministry of Finance.

He joined GOJEK in 2017 as a data scientist as he sees a strong tie between data science and machine learning. Now his main role is optimizing GOJEK’s supply spending and leading a team working on supply spending and building internal tools.

When asked why he particularly chose GOJEK, he said that he was charmed by GOJEK’s large data warehouse and how he could apply his skills to create social impact at scale. For Ridlo, learning opportunity is also important in choosing a job and believes that GOJEK’s data science team, which consists of people who study at some of the world’s most reputable universities, is the right path in his journey.

What was that? You also think they’re awesome. Yep. Told ya ;)

Imagine, if you’re a part of the #DataAvengers crew, you get to work (and also hang out) with these cool geeks almost every day, because their friendship is way more than just an algorithmic model. Sometimes, they talk about geeky stuff over coffee — dinner even! Be part of our crew by finding out if you have the superpower to be a REAL Data Scientist in this QUIZ.

PS: Thank you to Indra Budiari for writing Ridlo Nur Rahman’s Profile 😺