Our Team

Meet the team that's responsible for the magic behind Gradient.

Chris Chang

Co-Founder & CEO

Chris is the Co-Founder and CEO at Gradient, who most recently led Studio AI at Netflix and was an architect of early domain expert LLMs for content production and intelligence. Prior to joining Netflix, Chris held a variety of leadership roles at Pinterest, Opendoor, and Meta. Chris started his career in finance and holds a dual bachelors degree in computer science and business, and a master degree in computer science from UPenn.

Tiffany Peng

VP of Engineering & COO

Tiffany oversees all of our engineering and operational efforts here at Gradient. Prior to Gradient, making her way from Lumos where she led consumer product and dev platform. Prior to Gradient, Tiffany spent 6 years leading product and ML engineering at Opendoor - from Series B through IPO. Tiffany holds a bachelors degree in chemical-biological engineering and biology from MIT.

Nghi Nguyen

ML/AI Engineer

Nghi is a ML engineer at Gradient and has spent more than a decade in machine learning across companies like Meta, A9.com (Amazon), and Splunk. Prior to his career in tech, Nghi was a researcher and mathematician at the US Department of Defense. Nghi holds a bachelors, masters, and PhD in mathematics from UC Berkeley.

Jeff Ye

Business Operations Lead

Jeff is a business operations lead at Gradient, joining us after nearly a decade in various analytics, finance, GTM, and product roles at Segment, Google, and OpenDoor. Prior to shifting his focus to tech, Jeff spent several years in private equity and management consulting. Jeff holds a bachelors degree in Economics from Harvard University.

Rashi Singhania

Director of Demand Generation

Rashi leads our growth and demand generation efforts here at Gradient. Rashi joins us from years of experience at Google, Flipkart and early stage startups such as Strivr and BioRender - building out demand gen functions and ABM programs from 0 to 1. Rashi holds an undergraduate degree from St. Xavier's College and an MBA from University of Canterbury.

Ronak Bansal

Sr. Software Engineer

Ronak is a senior engineer at Gradient that brings a wealth of experience, especially within the startup scene. Ronak was a founding engineer at two dynamic startups - Finary (YC W21) & Repool (YC S21), where he built scalable, high-impact products for consumer finance and asset management respectively. Ronak holds a dual bachelors in computer science and electrical engineering from UC Berkeley.

Stewie Zhu

Global Partnerships Advisor

Stewie is our Global Partnerships Advisor, ensuring deep collaboration with international institutions. As a successful entrepreneur, Stewie has co-founded multiple startups and achieved two notable exits in the FinTech and Blockchain sectors. With over 12 years of experience as an active investor and advisor, Stewie brings a wealth of knowledge and insight to our team. He holds an MS degree from Yale, an MFE from Oxford University, and a PhD in finance from the London School of Economics.

Mark Kim-Huang

Co-Founder & Chief Architect

Mark is the Co-founder and Chief Architect at Gradient. Prior to Gradient, Mark led ML teams at Splunk and Box, leading research on streaming ML transitioning over from a nearly decade long career as a quantitative portfolio manager at companies like Stevens Capital, Paloma Partners, and TD Securities. Mark holds a dual bachelors degree in mathematics and finance from UPenn.

Leo Pekelis

Chief Scientist

As Gradient's Chief Scientist, Leo leads our research team. Prior to Gradient, Leo led CloudTruck's ML and data science orgs pioneering applied ML to operational challenges. Prior to CloudTrucks, Leo held leadership roles across Opendoor, Optimizely, and Disney. Leo holds a bachelors degree in economics from Stanford, as well as a masters and PhD in statistics from Stanford.

Adrian Miguel

Software Engineer

Adrian is one of our first software engineers at Gradient and was most recently at Fysical (acquired by Gimbal), working on high-performance location data software. Prior to Fysical, Adrian was at BevSpot where he built their core food and beverage management software from scratch. Adrian holds a bachelors degree in computer science from MIT.

Brenda Lee

Product Lead

Brenda is a product lead at Gradient, joining us from nearly a decade at Microsoft working on products to bring cloud services and solutions to large enterprises across Microsoft Azure. Most recently, Brenda spent a few years leading product in the decentralized data storage space, focusing on storage protocol design and node provider software. Brenda holds a bachelors degree in computer science from CMU and a masters in information systems from the University of Washington.

Devon Moore

Operations Associate

Devon is an operations associate here at Gradient, joining us from Deloitte where he specialized in planning and cross-border transactions for multinational clients. Prior to Deloitte, Devon worked in regulatory compliance and managed tax planning projects for NetJets and Greif, a global manufacturer. Devon holds a bachelors in business from the University of Cincinnati and a masters in economics from OSU.

Eric Johnston

Head of Sales

Eric is our founding GTM hire and Head of Sales at Gradient. Eric joins us from Google Cloud and Looker where he was an early-stage sales hire, key contributor, and leader across enterprise & strategic sales roles, channel partnerships, and international expansion. Eric holds a BA from Santa Clara University.

Ishan Kaul

Sr. Software Engineer

Ishan is a senior software engineer at Gradient who spent the last 4 years working at various Bay Area startups focused on AI (e.g. Ironclad, C3 AI, etc.), where he helped build and scale robust products and solutions. Ishan holds a MS in computer science from Vanderbilt University and a bachelors of computer science from Purdue University.

Forrest Moret

Co-Founder & CTO

Forrest is the Co-Founder and CTO at Gradient. Forrest was previously an engineering lead at Google building distributed serverless ML systems, and scaling out their technology to support exabyte-scale processing. He was also a founding engineer at Table, pioneering causal inference modeling for e-commerce. Forrest holds a bachelors degree in computer science from MIT.

Nathan Lam

VP of Marketing

Nathan is the VP of Marketing at Gradient, leading Gradient's brand and GTM efforts. Most recently, Nathan led marketing across commerce and fintech at Meta. Prior to Meta, Nathan held a variety of leadership roles at Box, Uber, Amazon, and Microsoft. Nathan holds a bachelors degree in business from the University of Washington and a masters degree in information systems from the University of Washington.

Hayden Wilson

Software Engineer

Hayden is one of our first engineers at Gradient and has spent the last decade as a software engineer, working at a variety of AI and ML startups. Hayden builds distributed computing clusters in his spare time, having recently helped build Gradient's 6.1TB VRAM, 16-node research cluster from scratch. Hayden holds a bachelors in computer science from Kansas State University.

Brian James

AI Product Engineer

Brian is a AI product engineer here at Gradient. Prior to joining Gradient, Brian was UX Engineer at Google, working on Flutter—the open-source application development framework. Before heading into tech, Brian taught design at Parsons School of Design and St. John’s University. Brian holds a M.F.A. in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Michael Feil

AI Engineer

Michael is one of our AI engineers at Gradient. Prior to joining, Michael was a ML engineer at Rodhe & Schwarz focusing on LLM research and was a researcher at both Max-Plank Institute for Intelligent Systems and Bosch Rexroth. Michael is a leading contributor to various open-source inference libraries for LLMs and open-source projects such as StarCoder. Michael holds a bachelors degree in mechatronics and IT from KIT and a masters in robotics from Technical University of Munich.

Joe Laurendi

Sr. Software Engineer

Joe is a senior software engineer here at Gradient, who has an extensive background in high-growth startups that focus on complex and robust software systems. From working as an engineering leader at OneSignal to starting his own company Bright Cellars, Joe’s skillsets could not be a better fit for Gradient. Joe holds a Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science from MIT.