Praful Mohanan is a machine learning engineer on the Data Science team at Prodigal, creating and refining models for our consumer finance AI.

He has a four-year degree in computer science from DY Patil University in Pune.

‍Where do you live?‍

In Mumbai. I am originally from Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, and grew up in Nashik, Maharashtra, but moved to Mumbai when I began working full-time for Prodigal.

Sheyril is also on the Data Science team in Mumbai, and Harsh and Akshat work in Mountain View, California.

Why Prodigal?

I started with Prodigal as an intern in Pune. I like the autotomy that small companies offer employees. You can just take a problem and brainstorm and get to a solution.

I was interested in machine learning early in my studies. The ability to make machines learn things that humans can do excites me.

For example, there are tasks humans find it difficult but machines find it easy. Not every human can beat a Grand Master at chess, but a machine can easily learn to do that. But something like making an omelet is easier for a human to learn but it is difficult for a machine to do that. So I'm excited to see where machine learning is going.

When I’m not working, you can find me…

I like to build open source projects and also contribute to them. One of the projects that I created while I was in college was a project because I was studying machine learning at that time and I did not have a study buddy. So I created a project where people could write down their interest and they would get an approximate location and they could chat and find people to study or do things with nearby. I like to build things by seeing what problems I face day to day.

I also like to read manga - One Piece and One-Punch Man are my favorites.

What would your co-workers be surprised to know about you?

I used to be a very hardcore gamer before my undergraduate degree. I have 2000 hours on Steam. I even competed on a team and we went to the semi-finals in India.

‍What’s your favorite Prodigal value?

I like We Take Action a lot. As engineers, we work in sprints where we know we have to do these three things in these two weeks, but often there are 10 things that come up between those two weeks.

So sometimes you need to take action on some of those things. You don't want to always wait for your product manager to prioritize when you know something needs to be done. The autonomy to act is something I like because you get to take action and drive impact because of it.

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Want to work with Praful and the other humans of Prodigal as we pioneer consumer finance intelligence? We’re hiring!