Summary
Eric Bakan is a data and engineering leader with 14 years of hands-on experience building products and platforms at early to mid-stage startups, currently serving as Head of Data at Y Combinator. He has spent the last decade shaping ML-powered products and data platforms, and five years scaling and managing cross-functional teams of engineers, data scientists, and psychometricians. His background spans founding a HIPAA-compliant EMR startup, leading core ML at Triplebyte, and building platform teams at Modern Health, giving him rare fluency across product, infrastructure, and applied ML. Based in San Francisco, he combines deep technical chops (from production ML stacks to React/Rails systems) with operational experience in regulated healthcare and assessment products. Known for translating research-grade models into user-facing services, he brings an operator’s pragmatism to designing reliable, privacy-conscious data systems.
14 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Massachusetts Institute of Technology