Working at Dandy: Dylan DeSantis, Senior Staff Computer Vision & Machine Learning Engineer

In this installment of Working at Dandy, we are excited to share insights from our Senior Staff Computer Vision & Machine Learning Engineer, Dylan DeSantis. Learn about his experiences and what makes him a valued member of our team.

Dandy is growing their ML team! Take a look at our open ML roles here.

What excites you most about working at Dandy, and how does it differ from other companies you've worked for?

• In my opinion, the most exciting part about working at Dandy is the opportunity to bring state of the art AI to an otherwise unexplored industry in the field of machine learning. As opposed to other companies where you can take off the shelf models and fine tune them for your application, nothing like that exists for the dental industry. It requires you to incorporate levels of creativity, research, and product development unlike almost any other industry.

Can you share a memorable project or accomplishment you've been a part of while working here, and what impact it had within Dandy or our users?

• While maybe not the most exciting project I’ve worked on at Dandy, in my opinion one of the most important projects I was a part of was the development and deployment of our MLOps infrastructure. A special characteristic of our senior leadership team is the understanding that the right way is the only way of doing things and anyone that practices machine learning will tell you that without a great MLOps foundation you’re bound to fail at scale. So the absolute first thing we did as a team was set up our infrastructure. Everything is now tracked and deployed automatically allowing the whole team to focus solely on developing our models and delivering value to our organization and customers.

How does our company culture support your professional growth and personal well-being?

• I’m an ambitious person by nature so it was important to me when joining Dandy that there was a clear path and system in place that supports professional growth. Beyond the bi-annual growth cycles, we have a culture which encourages leadership, learning, and mentoring. Every month, someone from our team can take the time to research some new topic or paper of their choosing and present it to the organization. Dandy also has a great understanding of personal well-being. For example, I was able to take an extended vacation to explore South America and return to work refreshed within my first 6 months of joining.

What unique opportunities or challenges have you encountered as a Senior Staff Engineer at Dandy?

• Dandy believes in customer obsession and because of this obsession I was provided with the opportunity to travel to Egypt for a week to shadow our internal customers. I learned the ins and outs of how they design our products which provided me with critical insights of how to develop our models and methods. Consequently, it also revealed one of our team’s biggest challenges which is that every design is a snowflake of artistry produced by the designer. As these designs are the basis of much of our training data, our team must discover how to translate these unique brush strokes of designers as inputs to our models so that we can fully replicate the best designs.

How would you describe the collaboration between the engineering and product teams, and how does it contribute to our overall success? 

• Frankly put, our product team is incredible. The relationship between engineering and product is so harmonious that on that same trip to Egypt I was joined by our team’s product lead, Claire, who sat next to me the entire time observing the exact same processes I did. This allowed us to bounce ideas off of each other in real time and form a great professional bond. Ever since then we have been in lock step, where she provides me the invaluable insight of the customer’s needs and company priorities and I provide her with the context of what we can solve, what resources we need, and how long it will take. Together we never miss a beat for our customers.

Thank you, Dylan!