Bileg Saikhan Naidan

Bileg likes being a data scientist because he gets to explore and experiment. He did his PhD in Approximate Nearest Neighbor search and co-created NMSLIB - an open-source similarity search library that has since been used worldwide.

Bileg grew up in a yurt in rural northern Mongolia. He spent his childhood as a self-taught inventor, building his own machines from scrap parts. He thinks if he weren't a data scientist, he'd likely be a surgeon, driven by the same urge to "cut things open and fix them". Bileg's career has taken him from a government scholarship in Siberia to advanced studies in Italy and Norway, with end-to-end experience across data science and production systems, eventually landing at Sunstone. He is a developer of such intensity that he has been known in the office to wear a wrist cast just to keep coding.

He has a calm presence, but ask him about his first horse (which he got at age five) and he will start talking.