A series of blogs highlighting our great employees and why they enjoy working at Citrine.
Erin Antono
Hi Citrine Blog readers!
My name is Erin Antono and I’m a Senior Data Scientist and Data Science + Data Engineering Strike Team Manager here at Citrine. I’ve been working at Citrine full-time for almost five years (six if you count my internship!).
My role at Citrine encompasses a wide variety of activities: as a data scientist, I work directly with our customers as a technical expert to support application and roll out of our machine learning platform across an organization. I also lead internal efforts to build, test and refine technology and create best practices. Finally, as a manager, I manage a small team of customer-facing data scientists and data engineers, and collaborate with other managers to continuously improve our best practices and processes in the customer department.
What is it like to work at Citrine?
Working at Citrine has been a challenging, exciting and rewarding experience. One element that’s worth highlighting is the experience of being at the forefront of introducing machine learning and data-driven approaches to the materials industry. Through working directly with our customers, I get a front-line view into the value that Citrine’s platform brings to their projects, technical challenges in the field of materials informatics, and new opportunities and applications for this technology.
What do you like best about working at Citrine?
The people at Citrine are a joy to work with! I’ve made close friends through my time at Citrine, and learned so many things from teammates across the company sharing their expertise: software development, management, data science, the difference between Black Metal and Death Metal music genres, etc.
What has been your favorite project during your time at Citrine?
My favorite recent project has been a collaboration with other Citrine data scientists and our Product team to prototype and test analyses and visualizations to help platform users make optimal decisions when they use our platform’s machine learning workflows.
How have you seen Citrine grow/improve since you started working here?
Citrine has grown significantly since I’ve started working here. When I started as an intern in 2015, the company was just 6 people! I’ve been fortunate to see the company grow through several different stages, from signing our first commercial customer to developing the first version of our platform technology to partnering with customers to roll out the Citrine Platform at enterprise scale.
What do you do when you’re not working?
On the weekends I’m usually going on little hikes, When I’m not working, I enjoy spending time outdoors, particularly backpacking and climbing in the Sierras, or taking my dog, Lentil, to local parks in the San Francisco area. Lately, I’ve also been developing budding interests in photography, geology and woodworking!
What’s your advice for those interested in working for a start-up in the materials informatics industry?
Come work at Citrine! That aside, I’d recommend fostering an interest and curiosity about materials science, and how much development and engineering goes into the products and materials that we interact with every day. One of the things that I really enjoy about working in the materials informatics industry has been the opportunity to take the tools of data science and informatics and use them in an application space that has an impact on the physical world around us.
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