Team
We are product-obsessed builders creating technology and our mission is TAI. We focus on practical applications over theoretical academics.
TypeSafe
was
founded
in
mid-2024
by
Diogo Almeida
,
Erik Gafni
and
Sasha Sheng
and
is
based
out
of
sunny
San Francisco.
We’re a small, world-class team working at the bleeding edge of the intersection of AI research and product, and we’re hiring.
Co-founders
Diogo Almeida
- AI Research (10 yrs)
- Ex-OpenAI (5 yrs), ex-Google Brain
- Co-invented InstructGPT, the methods that lead to ChatGPT and GPT4.
- Fun fact: made it to the top 30 in League of Legends in North America and top 2 in Hearthstone 🎮
Erik Gafni
- AI Research & Software (14 yrs)
- Ex-founder (2018, Ravel, multi-modal AI for DNA-seq)
- Early employee at 2 unicorns: Freenome (>$1B raised, AI) and Invitae ($6.5B+, IPO)
- Fun fact: placed 44th at Chess Nationals in Elementary School ♟️
Sasha Sheng
- AI Research & Software (12 yrs)
- Ex-research engineer @ Meta/FAIR (7 yrs), published at NeurIPS/ECVV
- Ex-founder / Executive Director, AI Engineer Foundation
- Fun fact: won 7 hackathons in 2023; addicted to caffeine and Barry’s Bootcamp ☕
Technical Staff
Elise Liu
- AI/ML, ProductManagement, & Consulting (12 yrs)
- Ex-Meta, BCG - led Meta's US midterms war room in 2018 and viral post detection in 2020
- Early employee at unicorns (Human Interest,Clubhouse)
- Fun fact: once a billionaire on Neopets before she was banned by her mother
Clayton Ward
- Software (9 yrs)
- Founding engineer
- Ex-Autodesk, Amazon, SIG; built systems for access controls, ad rank, and order flow
- Fun fact: has better taste in buds than taste buds 😛
Jeff Lin
- Software (14 yrs)
- Member of the initial team building out mobile at Facebook
- Ex-founder (2019, SignalBiosystems) Clubhouse)
- Stanford guest lecturer
- Fun fact: has been to 10 Burning Mans in a row 🔥
Val Chocklett
- AI Eng & Data Science (10yrs)
- Lead Data Scientist building official contact tracing solutions at Healthy Together
- Founding ML Engineer at Trill AI
- Fun fact: state pole-vaulting champion in high school 👟
Noam Samuel
- 10 years backend engineering (API and product focus). Stripe,Square.
- Fun fact: Like a Disney character, can and will burst into song over anything. 🎤
Ted Kalaw
- Software (12 yrs)
- Ex-Meta, Ripple - developer platform and tooling
- Built tools to help UnitedMasters discover new artists
- Fun fact: is a bass music and hip hop DJ 🎧
Brian Smiley
- Newly minted SoftwareEngineer
- But an expert already
- Fun fact: wears a carpetas a jacket 🧥
Eugene Shvarts
- ML & Software (10 yrs)
- Ex-Google Brain, led development on medical imaging data annotation platform
- Scale AI, EngineeringManager
- Ex-founder (2023,Thyself.ai, AI emotional support)
- Fun fact: coached Ghana'sInternational Math Olympiad team ➕➖
- Has previously built big things
- 11x coder: Has put in their 11,000 hours coding
- Obsessed with solving real-world problems with AI and making LLMs reliable
- Fun fact: tell us something interesting about yourself!
About
TypeSafe is a close-knit team with a nerdy and prank-positive culture. We’ve hung out at Charli XCX, Justin Timberlake, Glass Animals, and Tiesto, destroyed each other in Killer Queen (an IRL arcade game) at the Emporium, suffered through Core40 and Barry’s Bootcamp, and eaten our way through every restaurant in Hayes Valley.
