Hardik Vala is a founder and machine learning engineer with 11 years of experience building production ML systems, distributed training, and privacy-preserving federated learning at Apple and Google before founding two startups, one of which was YC S23. He blends research (graduate work in NLP with tier-1 publications) and product execution—driving LLM fine-tuning, retrieval, and MLOps for cloud platforms and Edge-scale recommender systems. Hardik also contributed to tensorflow-federated, improving iterative process composition and dependency alignment for decentralized ML workflows. Known for learning quickly from setbacks (failed early courses, tough interview cycles, and a previous startup flop), he turned those lessons into technical leadership and new ventures in AI agents, memory-augmented models, and distributed model training. Based in San Francisco, he shares practical ML advice for aspiring engineers and holds a BS in Math & Computer Science from McGill.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
High School Diploma, High School Diploma at Colonel By Secondary School
Bachelor of Science - BS, Mathematics and Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Mathematics and Computer Science at McGill University
An open-source framework for machine learning and other computations on decentralized data.
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
Contributions:2 releases, 1 review, 24 commits in 9 months
Contributions summary:Hardik contributed to the development of the `tensorflow-federated` repository by modifying and testing code related to iterative process compositions for machine learning on decentralized data. Their work included enhancing the framework to allow datasets within nested computation argument structures in the iterative processing. Furthermore, they addressed dependency conflicts in the notebook tutorials, upgrading versions of `absl-py`, `jax`, and `jaxlib` to align with the project's requirements.
Contributions:3 pushes, 1 branch, 1 comment in 5 years 5 months
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