As you may know, I recently received a Lyft offer for software engineer intern in machine learning for summer 2020.
Just got off the phone with a Lyft engineering manager! He gave me some very exciting and interesting news and information about the New York Lyft office.
New York Lyft office has several teams including Marketplace Labs, as well as several product teams, like: Pick-up (all the data that gets sent when a rider is picked up by a driver), (Routing? Mapping? Vardhan did mention something about toll-booth prediction, and how they would predict the tolls they pay, to include in the driver price, and the customer complaints prediction, based on the price as well.) Recall: ensuring availability and uptime: 100 million rides should be successful before a failure. This is probably related to pick-up/hailing and just related to the core app! It has around 200 employees total right now.
So it seems like the choice here is really between Pricing and Marketplace Labs. Pricing is a product-focused team, where the effort is really on delivering the pricing API product; in a sense, Pricing is a sister team of Vardhan’s team in Marketplace Labs. Vardhan did stress two key points:
1) San Fran is the headquarters 2) There is no current intern project in mind for Lyft ML New York; new work might involve more engineering related functions
Marketplace Labs is like an incubator, where they have lots of new ideas that are piloted and experimented with. Note that there is no direct product that they are working on/LoB they are supporting. Instead, it is about research, and trying out different things. They have collaboration with Lyft Level 5: for instance, working with positioning a fleet of self-driving cars.
Note: Even though they have some top economists and business minds at Marketplace Labs, it is NOT just about pricing and prime time, instead; Marketplace Labs looks at a wide variety of new ideas. It is called Marketplace Labs because this was where it initially started.
Some follow-up questions I would love to ask: 1. Any potential for research publications, or research-intensive projects at Marketplace Labs? We can definitely turn around a paper in 4 months times. 2. What is a project you have been working on recently? 3. You mentioned some famous deep learning faculty at Lyft, who exactly are they? 4. The team sounded good: UMB prof, NYU prof as the research director, etc. 5. What other product teams are there in the NY office? 6. Questions for Kayleigh: what are the alternatives? Could we talk about the possibility of working out of the New York office for a week? (I can live with my sister during that time)
Key insight: Lyft Marketplace Labs sounds exactly like Uber ATG here! John