WiMLDS Member Spotlight: Shruti Sharma
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Spotlight on: Shruti Sharma
Engineering Manager, Stripe
Pronouns: she, her, hers
What do you do for a living? How do you explain your job to people outside of your field? I work as an Engineering Manager for the Machine Learning team on the Identity product at Stripe. For those outside tech, I define machine learning as the technology that allows computers to look at data and learn patterns from it which in turn helps us make predictions when the computer sees new data in the future. My team is responsible for building machine learning systems and models for Stripe’s new identity product. Stripe Identity helps merchants digitally verify the identity of their customers for fraud, regulatory and trust & safety purposes.
How did you get into DS & ML? What was your learning process? I focused on image processing and computer vision during my Master’s. As part of that, I learned some aspects of machine learning as well in graduate school.
How did you get your first job in DS & ML? After finishing grad school, I took a job at VSCO to use my image processing and computer vision skills to build photo editing tools. A couple years into that job, the company was scaling their machine learning team and I was offered to make an internal transfer to that team. It was a great opportunity to get into Machine Learning and learn new things about the field while still leveraging the skills I had.
What does your workday look like? What do you spend the most time on in your day? A huge part of my day is made up of meetings and chatting with people. It includes 1:1s with direct reports, planning meetings, technical discussions, as well as building/maintaining relationships with partner teams and stakeholders. I also review technical design documents and/or pull requests to ensure I keep up with the projects my teammates are working on. Occasionally, I try to find some time to write code as well to continue building my technical skills.
What is your DS/ML toolkit? What’s your favorite instrument? The tool I’ve used the most is TensorFlow. The open source nature of it and the community support is great. Given the investment from the creators as well as the community contributors, it is constantly improving and the experience of using it keeps becoming more pleasant. They have actively invested in Keras support in the last few years to make it much more accessible to beginners.
What they don’t teach you at school: what surprised you the most in the first few years of your career? At school, there is a lot of importance placed on building new things. In real-life, there is so much value ML engineers can bring by iterating on their models or improving the systems they work on. Learning the value of optimizing systems, building successfully on top of others’ work, and knowing when not to build something from scratch was something I had to get comfortable with in the first few years of my career.
How do you find mentors? How do you ask for mentorship? I’ve been fortunate enough to find managers in my career who have turned into life-long mentors. I continue my relationship with most of my managers even if we no longer work at the same company and seek advice when I have big career decisions to make. Another way I have found mentors is by having my managers connect me with their network and introduce me to folks in the field they think would be helpful for me to build relationships with.
What do you do to recharge after an intense workday? I enjoy reading, hiking, photography, and baking. For me, the best way to recharge is spending some time away from screens.
What are the small things that bring you joy? Being able to lend an ear when someone needs it — it’s a small gesture but can go a long way in making someone’s day better. I find joy in doing that for others — luckily for me, it’s also part of my job as a manager which means I am well set-up to find joy at my job as well.
Is there anything you wanted to ask the WiMLDS members about? I’m always curious to hear what drew folks to the ML/DS field and what keeps them excited to stay.
What is the best way to get connected with you? You can find me on Twitter: @curioushruti
