For today’s version of “Behind the Enc-urtain”, we sat down with Shivant, Technical CSM at Encord, to learn more about his journey and day-to-day role. Shivant joined the GTM team when it was a little more than a 10 person task force, and has played a pivotal role in our hypergrowth over the last year.

In this post, we’ll learn more about the camaraderie he shares with the team, what culture at Encord is like, and the thrill of working on some pretty fascinating projects with some of today’s AI leaders. 

To start us off - could you introduce yourself to the readers, & share more about your journey to Encord?

Of course! 

I’m originally from South Africa – I studied Business Science and Information Systems, and started my career at one of the leading advisory firms in Cape Town. As a Data Scientist, I worked on everything from technology risk assessments to developing models for lenders around the world. I had a great time - and learned a ton!

In 2022 I was presented the opportunity to join a newly-launched program in Analytics at London Business School, one of the best Graduate schools in the world. I decided to pack up my life (quite literally!) and move to London. That year was an insane adventure – and I didn’t know at the time but it prepared me extremely well for what my role post-LBS would be like. It was an extremely diverse and international environment, courses were ever-changing and a good level of challenging, and, as the cliche goes, I met some of my now-best friends!

I went to a networking event in the spring, where I met probably two dozen startups that were hiring – I think I walked around basically every booth, and actually missed the Encord one. [NB: it was in a remote corner!] 

As I was leaving I saw Lavanya [People Associate at Encord] and Nikolaj [Product Manager at Encord] packing up the booth. We started chatting and fast forward to today… here we are!

What was something you found surprising about Encord when you joined?

How closely everyone works together. I still remember my first day – my desk-neighbors were Justin [Head of Product Engineering], Eric [Co-founder & CEO] and Rad [Head of Engineering]. Coming from a 5,000 employee organization, I already found that insane!

Then throughout the day, AEs or BDRs would pass by and chat about a conversation they had just had with a prospect – and engineers sitting nearby would chip in with relevant features they were working on, or ask questions about how prospects were using our product. It all felt quite surreal. I now realize we operate with extremely fast and tight feedback loops and everyone generally gets exposure to every other area of the company – it’s one of the reasons we’ve been able to grow and move as fast as we have.

What’s your favorite part of being a Technical CSM at Encord?

The incredibly inspiring projects I get to help our customers work on. When most people think about AI today they mostly think about ChatGPT but, beyond LLMs, companies are working on truly incredible products that are improving so many areas of society.

To give an example – on any given day, my morning might start with helping the CTO of a generative AI scale-up improve their text-to-video model, be followed by a call with an AI team at a drone startup who is trying to more accurately detect carbon emissions in a forest, and end with meeting a data engineering team at a large healthcare org who’s working on deploying a more automated abnormality-detector for MRI scans. 

I can’t really think of any other role where I’d be exposed to so much of “the future”. It’s extremely fun. 

What words would you use to describe the Encord culture?

Open and collaborative. We’re one team, and the default for everyone is always to focus on getting to the best outcome for Encord and our customers.

Also, agile: the AI space we’re in is moving fast, and we’re able to stay ahead of it all and incorporate cutting-edge technologies into our platform to help our customers – sometimes a few days from it being released by Meta or OpenAI.

And then definitely diverse: we’re 60 employees, from 34 different nationalities, which is incredibly cool. I appreciate being surrounded by people from different backgrounds, it helps me see things in ways I wouldn’t otherwise, and has definitely challenged a lot of what I thought was the norm. 

What are you most excited re. Encord or the CS team this year? 

There’s a lot to be excited about – this will be a huge year for us. We recently opened our San Francisco office to be closer to many of our customers, so I’m extra excited about having a true Encord base in the Bay area and getting to see everyone more regularly in person. 

We’re also going to grow the CS team past Fred & I for the first time! We’re looking for both Technical CSMs and Senior CSMs to join the team, both in London and in SF, as well as Customer Support Engineers and ML Solutions Engineers.

On the topic of hiring… who do you think Encord would be the right fit for? Who would enjoy Encord the most?

In my experience, people who enjoy Encord the most have a strong sense of self-initiative and ambition – they want to achieve big, important outcomes but also realize most of the work to get there is extremely unglamorous and requires no task being “beneath” them. They tend to always approach a problem with the intent of finding a way to get to the solution, and generally get energy from learning and being surrounded by other talented, extremely smart people. Relentlessness is definitely a trait that we all share at Encord. A lot of our team is made up of previous founders, I think that says a lot about our culture. 

See you at the next episode of “Behind the Enc-urtain”! And as always, you can find our careers page here😉