SF AI/ML Meetup - Agents of Intelligence: Engineering the Next Generation of AI Systems
Join us for an engaging AI/ML Meetup focused on the evolving landscape of AI technologies. In Agents of Intelligence: Engineering the Next Generation of AI Systems, we'll explore how autonomous agents and cutting-edge ML architectures are shaping the future of AI development.
This event is geared toward machine learning engineers, technical practitioners, and those looking to dive deeper into emerging tools, frameworks, and real-world applications. The evening will feature keynote speakers and time to connect with peers during a dedicated networking session.
Agenda:
5:30pm - 6:00pm: Event check-in
6:00pm - 7:40pm: Speaker Sessions
7:40pm - 8:15pm: Fireside chat
8:15pm - 9:00pm: Networking over food and drinks
Speakers include:
Matei Zaharia - CTO & Cofounder @ Databricks
Shreya Rajpal - Cofounder & CEO @ Guardrails AI
Zhenzhen Liu - Principal ML Engineer @ DoorDash
Sudeep Das - Head of New Verticals ML @ DoorDash
Randy DeFauw - Sr. Principal Solutions Architect @ AWS
Fireside chat will include:
Sudeep Das - Sudeep Das - Head of New Verticals ML @ DoorDash (moderator)
Jeff Wang - CEO @ Windsurf
Shreya Rajpal - Cofounder & CEO @ Guardrails AI
Randy DeFauw - Sr. Principal Solutions Architect @ AWS
Ian Baldwin - Applied AI Research Scientist @ DoorDash
Location:
AWS Builder Loft
525 Market St, San Francisco, CA 94105
About the speakers:
Shreya Rajpal
Shreya Rajpal is the CEO of Guardrails AI, an open-source platform developed to ensure increased safety, reliability, and robustness of large language models in real-world applications. Her expertise spans a decade in the field of machine learning and AI. Most recently, she was the founding engineer at Predibase (acq. by Rubrik), where she led the ML infrastructure team. In earlier roles, she was part of the cross-functional ML team within Apple's Special Projects Group and developed computer vision models for autonomous driving perception systems at Drive AI.
Matei Zaharia
Matei is the CTO and co-founder of Databricks and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. He started the Apache Spark project during his Ph.D. program at UC Berkeley in 2009 and has worked on other widely used data and AI software, including MLflow, Delta Lake, ColBERT, and Dolly. His recent research is about combining large language models (LLMs) with external data sources, such as search systems, and improving their efficiency and result quality. Matei’s research was recognized through the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award and the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).
Randy DeFauw
Randy DeFauw is a Sr. Principal Solutions Architect at AWS. He has over 20 years of experience in technology, starting with his university work on autonomous vehicles. He has worked with and for customers ranging from startups to Fortune 50 companies, launching Big Data and Machine Learning applications. He holds an MSEE and an MBA, serves as a board advisor to K-12 STEM education initiatives, and has spoken at leading conferences including Strata and GlueCon. He is the co-author of the books SageMaker Best Practices and Generative AI Cloud Solutions. Randy currently acts as a technical advisor to AWS' director of technology in North America.
Sudeep Das
Sudeep Das is a distinguished AI/ML leader and currently heads Machine Learning for New Business Verticals at DoorDash, where he drives AI innovation across personalization, search, logistics, and product knowledge graph. Prior to this, he led advanced ML initiatives at Netflix, OpenTable, and Beats Music focused on recommendations and user experiences. He holds a PhD in Astrophysics from Princeton and made pioneering discoveries in his early research career at UC Berkeley. Passionate about mentorship and outreach, Sudeep actively contributes to the ML community through global education efforts, conference reviews, and public speaking engagements.
Zhenzhen Liu
Zhenzhen Liu is a machine learning engineer with over a decade of industry experience, specializing in recommendation systems and, more recently, in applied generative AI. She previously worked at Yahoo, Google, Waymo, Snap, and Airbnb, and she recently joined the Consumer Engineering team at DoorDash, where she leads efforts in personalization and search.
Ian Baldwin
Ian Baldwin has a background in computer vision and machine learning, and has worked in self-driving cars and space robots. Most recently, he co-founded Booth.ai to build and scale gen-ai image creation pipelines, and currently, he is working on the application of gen-ai across consumer and merchant verticals at DoorDash.
Jeff Wang
Jeff Wang is the CEO of Windsurf, the company behind the first agentic IDE, stepping into the role in July 2025. He originally joined as the Founding Head of Business, where he helped build the current team and lead key operations for growth. Since then, Windsurf has scaled to serve a large and active community of developers, industry partners, and enterprise customers. Prior to Windsurf, he co-founded RocketFuel Education and RNR Capital, held executive roles at several startups, and began his career at Salesforce and Cisco.