In this episode, Katherine Druckman speaks to Alex Scammon, who leads the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) at G Research. Alex discusses the company's significant contributions to open source projects and their unique operating model. He covers the success of Armada, a CNCF sandbox project for multi-cluster batch scheduling, and the considerable efforts of G Research’s OSPO, which includes 30 engineers dedicated to direct open source contributions. Alex also shares insights on the benefits of supporting open source projects, the complexities of project prioritization, and the collaborative efforts in the open source community. The episode emphasizes the importance of sustainable open source involvement and offers a glimpse into G Research's mission to use AI and ML tools to drive financial market predictions.
00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:08 Overview of Alex's Role and OSPO
03:27 Importance of Open Source Contributions
04:37 Prioritizing Projects and G Research
07:27 Challenges and Collaboration
12:43 Personal Journey in Open Source
18:09 Encouraging Open Source Contributions
Guest: Alex Scammon: Currently, I'm leading a large and intrepid band of open-source engineers engaged in a number of philanthropic upstream contributions on behalf of G-Research. All of our work centers around open-source data science and machine learning tools and the MLOps and HPC infrastructure to support those tools at scale. We're almost certainly hiring.... As part of this work, I'm also leading a discussion around batch scheduling on Kubernetes as the chair of the CNCF's Batch Working Group. Please reach out if this is an area of interest for you -- we'd love to have more voices at the table!