Laserlike, Inc.

Overview
Laserlike understands all of your interests. It constantly processes all of the world's information to deliver what's interesting to you. It connects you to people who share the same interests, but doesn't lock you into a friend filter bubble. We are building a novel product that utilizes advanced Machine Learning, AI, IR, NLP combined with efficient and fun UX to help users fulfill their information needs.

Tech Challenges
While Laserlike isn’t building a traditional search engine, our technical challenges overlap with building a regular search stack and more. In addition to challenges you would see in building a traditional web-scale search engine such as in information retrieval and ranking, applying machine learning, evaluation etc, we are applying state of the art data mining, Deep Learning, NLP, structured data processing, high performance real-time stream processing and graph algorithms to make information access extremely personalized and easy for the user. In addition, we are creating novel UX towards helping the mobile user harness the power of all these algorithmic innovations.

Founders
Cheenu Venkatachary — CTO & Cofounder
Srinivasan (Cheenu) Venkatachary is Cofounder and CTO at Laserlike Inc. Before that, he worked as an Engineering Director in Google Search. He helped start and manage several critical projects: Machine Learning Libraries (Ranklab), A/B testing, Logs Processing, Real Time Search and Web Based Natural Language Q&A (WebAnswers). Prior to this he started a company, Sahasra Networks, in the networking space, which was acquired by Cypress Semiconductor and then by Netlogic Microsystems. Before that he worked at Microsoft Research. He has a PhD in computer science from Washington University, St. Louis and a B.Tech in CS from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

Anand Shukla — Chief Architect & Cofounder
Anand Shukla is Co-founder and Chief Architect at Laserlike Inc. Before that, he worked at Google as a tech lead / TLM in multiple projects in search ranking. Anand helped build query serving infrastructure that powers Google search and developed core ranking algorithms that significantly improve a third of Google’s search traffic. He specializes in large scale machine learning, document understanding, user session and behaviour modeling and high performance infrastructure. He has a MS in computer science from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and B.Tech in computer science and engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

Steve Baker - ​Chief Scientist & Cofounder
Steven (Steve) Baker is a Cofounder at Laserlike, Inc. Before that, he was a Distinguished Engineer in Google Search. Steve co-founded key projects on language understanding and artificial intelligence at Google: Notably, he created the synonyms system, which processed petabytes of data to build statistical/machine learned models of word equivalence. He created WebAnswers, which is the largest question answering system in the world that answers billions of questions a week on Google search and the assistant. He also was responsible at one time or another for the top three most important search relevance signals. Steve has a BA in computer science from Cornell University, New York.

Coding/Platform
We currently do all backend development in golang on top of GCP (Google Cloud). Our frontend dev is react/react native + pure native implementation for some application components. The Machine Learning team uses the Tensorflow system.
While experience in those technologies is useful, we are open to different backgrounds. The most important thing we’re looking for is smart people who get things done. If you’re a great c++ or scala programmer, you’d have no problem picking up golang. If you’re a great swift frontend developer, you can learn react native.