Kris Efland

VP of Engineering

Deepgram

May 2025 - Current (1 year 4 months)

ML/AI Leadership

Amazon Web Services AWS

Jan 2022 - Apr 2025 (3 years 4 months)

Tech Advisor; Generative AI strategy and AI service portfolio planning - Jul 2024-Apr 2025 Head of Engineering; Amazon Personalize, Clean Rooms ML & Differential Privacy - Feb 2024-Jul 2024 GM, SageMaker Geospatial - Jan 2022-Feb 2024

Head of AV Tools - Level 5, Autonomous Vehicle Division

Lyft

Apr 2018 - Jan 2022 (3 years 10 months)

Head of AV Tools - July 2020-Jan 2022 Miracle Monger - Nov 2019-Dec 2020 Head of AV Maps - Mar 2018-Dec 2019

Director, Engineering - Highly Automated Driving

HERE Technologies

Jan 2017 - Mar 2018 (1 year 3 months)

HERE is a global leader in digital maps; my focus was on building HD maps for autonomous vehicles and drones. My teams built and maintained the core infrastructure for the entire company including all map capture and sensor technology (HW) engineering and the Company’s core software pipeline for all map products and derivations. Oversaw computer vision and machine learning teams responsible for feature detection and extraction from perspective, aerial and satellite imagery. Heavily involved in HERE’s Bay Area collaborations with numerous autonomous vehicle partners. -- Led geographically diverse team of 130+ engineers across multiple disciplines including sw, hw, and design. Executive stakeholder for the top strategic accounts at HERE incl

Director, Engineering

Nokia

Feb 2015 - Oct 2015 (9 months)

Led application and back-end engineering for Nokia’s new digital health products for consumers. Incubated engineering and product development for Nokia Steel digital watches from stealth group, through NPI to self-sufficient business unit (Nokia Health). Built and directed a world-class data science team to develop core technology for both consumer and commercial applications (hospitals). Specific areas of focus: wearable biometric product development and sensor analysis. Including biometric and behavioral data during sleep and active periods using proprietary algorithms and licensed libraries. Development and productionizing of ML models analyzing biometric data from wearables and iPhone/Android.

CTO / Co-Founder

Teforia

Nov 2014 - Nov 2016 (2 years 1 month)

[Acquired by Adagio Teas] Directed all technology functions and activities for a Series-A start-up (the world’s first intelligent, connected tea-brewing IoT appliance) from prototype through delivery to customers in Fall of 2016. Oversaw engineering, product, customer support, and IT functions. Acting product manager for the company, hands-on engineering manager and individual contributor to the company’s device firmware, web properties, engineering tool chain and operations platform. Co-designed, developed and shipped an IoT/connected consumer appliance along with companion iOS and Android applications and cloud services. The device is currently rated 5 stars on Amazon (as of Dec 2016). Developed and deployed a fully connected operati

M

Advisor

MITStanford Venture Lab VLAB

Feb 2014 - Feb 2017 (3 years 1 month)

Director, Engineering

Nokia

Nov 2012 - Jan 2015 (2 years 3 months)

Everyday Adventure was a stealth consumer internet and devices business at Nokia. EA was developing a new category of smart, connected devices, apps and a cloud service with a focus on ultra HD and high-speed imaging coupled with location services and sensor fusion (activity classification), and packaged into ruggedized yet sleek hardware products. My team built the first internal, custom Android kernel and baselayer at Nokia. Specific areas of focus: consumer hardware bring-up and productization; Android kernel, HAL and middleware customization; sensor fusion, activity recognition and location/context aware devices and cloud; digital imaging and computational photography; Mobile+IoT SDK design; contextual machine learning and data mining.

Principal Product Manager, HERE Maps

Nokia

Oct 2011 - Nov 2012 (1 year 2 months)

Promoted to manage product requirements for the Maps Platform product and secure key customers. Acted as an evangelist to developers seeking an alternative to Google Maps. Worked across multiple functions and teams to unify the product vision, simplify the message, and deliver to key customers. Managed various accounts. Landed Amazon as a key customer to use HERE Maps across all its FireOS devices. Account lead for Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, Mozilla (Firefox OS), Microsoft (Windows Phone), Groupon, Evernote, Yahoo!, eBay/Stub Hub, and MapQuest.

Chief Architect, Messaging and Social Products

Nokia

Oct 2009 - Oct 2011 (2 years 1 month)

Managed build-out for all social media and messaging engineering activities for Nokia globally. Led teams in prototyping new products and assisting established product teams with difficult problems. Directed software architecture in all messaging and social media product development activities for all Nokia products globally. Played key role in saving >$75MM annually by driving a harmonized architecture across all products. Worked extensively on engineering integration for the Nokia-Yahoo! partnership and the company's migration to Windows Phone. Co-designed the architecture for Nokia's cloud-based address book, end-user handset notification system, cloud inter-service messaging fabric, social network aggregation platform, and push email

CTO / Principal Engineer

MyLifeOnline

Mar 2008 - Oct 2009 (1 year 8 months)

[MLO's chief competitor, FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook in 2009] MyLifeOnline was a white label social networking platform that aggregated social media account feeds to augment existing web content destinations (embedded Like button, artifact sharing, social commenting, etc). Directed all technology functions and activities for a Series-A start-up. Championed the company’s product vision and led engineering teams in development and delivery initiatives. Oversaw the full software development lifecycle. Designed, co-developed and deployed a modern web architecture for 20x better scale and simplified maintenance. Created plugin framework for collecting data from multiple social networks before there were public APIs or everyone’s web

COO / Co-Founder

IntraMeta

Aug 2003 - Oct 2008 (5 years 3 months)

Co-founded and held full P&L responsibility for operations of early-cloud computing company that competed directly with NetSuite (acquired by Oracle). IntraMeta’s technology is in use today (2015) by PwC, Deloitte, NASA, Bain, IBM, Proctor & Gamble and Chevron. Co-developed an on-demand cloud platform for scaling IntraMeta’s service infrastructure, similar to Amazon Web Services.

V

VP Infrastructure / Product Architect

VUIT

Apr 2002 - Aug 2003 (1 year 5 months)

Helped successfully deliver wireless “Face Time” video calling from coast-to-coast on a custom tablet PC, eight years before Apple. Individually contributed the design and led deployment of a 4G OFDM based RF and free space optical network that covered San Diego, Los Angeles and Manhattan NY. Led the design and engineering of a custom wireless access point for municipal-wide infrastructure type deployments in challenging RF (urban) environments.

Senior Staff Engineer

Alvarion Inc

May 2000 - Apr 2002 (2 years)

Technical Lead on large-scale wireless network projects in North and Central America, Europe, the Middle East and Eastern Africa. Designed the wireless control network for the Las Vegas Monorail. Ideated, built and launched a new profit center for the company through up-selling consolidated support services and network monitoring tools.

VP Engineering

Atipa

Nov 1995 - Feb 1999 (3 years 4 months)

Atipa was the very first company to sell custom computers on the web. It is still, one of the world leaders in commodity-based super-computer clusters. They currently have seven ranking systems among the 500 fastest supercomputers worldwide, according to top500.org. Major customers include Los Alamos National Labs, Dow Chemical, Harvard, MIT, CalTech, Lawrence Livemore Labs, Schlumberger, Jet Propulsion Labs, and Kodak among others.

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