About Me
“If I only knew who I am. Which I am I?”
I sometimes catch myself wondering the exact same thing that D-503, the protagonist of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, asks himself. I find myself in D-503 more often than not, the mathematician-engineer working on tight schedules, whose world cracks when he discovers the irrational self that lives within.
Am I only an FDE at DataCebo, an MIT spinout? Am I a 24-year-old kid from Pančevo, a city almost no one has heard of? Or am I the min-maxing powerlifting competitor?
In those clashing I's, much like Zamyatin's protagonist, I see cracks forming. But unlike D-503, I am not going to succumb to order above all else. The I that I will be is the crimson sunset colliding with the cold, ordered city horizon. That collision is what makes me truly me.
Currently I am, as mentioned, a Forward Deployed Engineer at an MIT spinout, with a deep interest in governance and compliance. To some that might come off as boring, but boring is exactly where the leverage is, and compliance has been intertwined with my career from the very start. Closely following the first AI boom and the ChatGPT craze, I was offered a job as a Data Annotator, monitoring chatbot outputs, mainly coding ones, flagging mischief and keeping compliance in mind the whole time, all as a 2nd-year CS student. The transition to a proper Software Engineer role at Luxoft seemed like the right call at the time, but in retrospect I didn't enjoy that bland, corporate role. I was wondering about a switch when I got the chance to move to a different company and become a Data Scientist, a dream step up. Soon after joining, compliance came back into the picture: my first real project was a mental health AI, which, as many can imagine, is a compliance nightmare. The acronyms HIPAA, FERPA and GDPR are a wall most companies in that space run into, and our team was no exception, on top of the underlying issues that come with combining mental health and AI. Not long after the project started, I saw an opening when the person leading it left, and I took my chance and stepped up, a 23-year-old kid leading a project with big compliance implications and a team with three times my experience. The step up was, to say the least, amazing: it felt like I was finally where I needed to be, and I shined there. Then came the natural next step; instead of dealing with compliance for yourself, help others deal with it. Thus, at 24, I am where I am now, working closely with synthetic data, the tool built especially for that problem.
In the background of all of this, I have never stopped working in parallel on my own consultancy, a client here and there, helping mostly small businesses achieve their big data and AI dreams. Doing all of this while being from Pančevo might seem impossible. People often say you have to move to make opportunities for yourself, that a small city only ties you down, but with the right mentors I found the small city actually gives you the personality and perspective that is often missed in those big offices.
Doing that much must come at a big health cost, right? Well, imagine I told you that during that time I first hit my 200kg squat, and later an all-time PR of 255kg, on the squat of all exercises. Then came competing at a national level and hitting numbers I had only dreamed of before. It all started with a friend suggesting an outlandish idea: let's compete at nationals. The end of that story is that we now own our very own powerlifting club, with over 20 competitors, run as a non-profit to get kids into sports. My next goal is simple: be the healthiest I can be; I chase performance numbers, not vanity ones.
Bringing it all back to the opening question: the combined I of my three I's is now working with Fortune 500 companies to bring them closer to synthetic data, building my own consultancy with the goal of growing it into something truly special in the heart of Vojvodina, and chasing my first sub-4 marathon.
These three I's keep thinking out loud in the Thoughts tab. That's where this page continues. And if something there strikes you, or you think I've got it wrong, email me at nemanja@vujic.ai. Tell me where I'm wrong; those are my favourite messages.