Naren Krishna
CEO & Co-founder at Balerion AI
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNaren Krishna is a founder-engineer and CEO with six years of experience building production ML and data platforms from research prototypes to venture-backed startups. He co-founded Balerion AI to automate loan manufacturing for mortgage lenders after engineering roles at Snowflake and an acquisition-track founding role at Ponder, blending deep ML knowledge with product and go-to-market execution. His hands-on contributions include adding distributed BERT training support to the Determined.ai open-source platform, reflecting practical expertise in PyTorch, data pipelines, and scaling GPU workloads. Comfortable moving between low-level ML engineering, data infrastructure, and company strategy, he combines academic roots at UC Berkeley and early hardware/vision work on FPGAs with startup operator experience backed by Kleiner Perkins and others. An unspoken strength is his pattern of building for acquisition-readiness—shipping durable infrastructure and integrations that attract strategic buyers.
6 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences at University of California, BerkeleyAmador Valley High School
English, French, Tamil
Github Skills (11)
pytorch10
machine-learning10
distributed-training10
deep-learning10
bert10
data-pipelines9
data-science9
tensorflow9
data-pipeline9
keras8
hyperparameter-optimization7
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (4)
determined-ai/determined
May 2020 - Oct 2021
Determined is an open-source machine learning platform that simplifies distributed training, hyperparameter tuning, experiment tracking, and resource management. Works with PyTorch and TensorFlow.
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:177 reviews, 48 commits, 99 PRs in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Naren's primary contributions involve implementing and integrating BERT on the SQuAD dataset within the Determined AI platform. Their work encompassed adding the BERT model to the experimental models directory, fixing issues in the data pipeline, and ensuring distributed training functionality. The user's changes included modifications to model definitions, data loading and processing scripts, and startup scripts related to the BERT model. They focused on adding support for PyTorch and distributed training using this specific ML model.
pytorchdata-sciencedeep-learningdistributed-trainingmachine-learning
naren-determined/determined
May 2020 - Oct 2021
Determined: Deep Learning Training Platform
Contributions:2 PRs, 301 pushes, 57 branches in 1 year 4 months
pytorchcaffe2deep-learningmachine-learningtraining
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