A Q&A with Yue Liu, Head Of Cloud Engineering
Cornerstone AI is publishing a series of Q&As with team members to provide more information and context on their role at Cornerstone AI, as well as their professional background. This is the eigth post of the series. Visit our blog to see previous posts in the series.
Your background is in programming, software development, and engineering—can you tell me a little about why you chose to go into that field in the first place?
I started with chemical engineering for my bachelor's degree. When I entered graduate school, I studied bio-analytical chemistry; however, I had also been interested in programming, probably since high school. So when I got a chance, I tried to bring programming to my graduate studies. Once I was close to graduation, I purposely looked for positions offering a combination of the two fields: biochemistry and programming.
My first job was as a scientific programmer at an analytical instrument company, so that was a good combination of both fields. I could use my chemistry background and also do programming, as my job was to write data acquisition and analysis software for an analytical instrument. About a year later, I changed jobs and moved to the Washington, DC, area, which is where I am right now.
That was when I began my work for Gene Logic, a biotech software company working on gene expression data. At that time, DNA sequencing was kind of on fire, and Gene Logic extracted gene expression data and sold data access to pharmaceutical companies for designing better drugs. While I was at Gene Logic, I also earned my second master's degree in statistics—a subject area that helped me understand data analysis better.
You also worked with companies including Medidata and Northrop Grumman before coming to Cornerstone AI—was there anything in particular that compelled you to make this change?
I met Mike, Cornerstone's co-founder, when I was working at Gene Logic. He was the head of the biostatistics group, while I was working in a nearby group on lab automation. But we were under the same larger data management group at the company. I have since worked with Mike multiple times afterwards. When I was at Northrop Grumman, I worked on a government contract with a healthcare database. After that, I was involved in a startup briefly. Then I got in touch with Mike again and began working for his earlier startup, Patient Profiles, which was later acquired by Medidata.
Medidata is a big software provider for clinical trials, and people there worked pretty closely. So that's why, when Mike and Andrew decided to leave Medidata and started Cornerstone AI, several of us followed. We were already working closely at that time, and we wanted to work together more.
In the early stage of Cornerstone AI's growth, we had a very small team with new hires mostly coming from personal referrals, so people more or less knew others when joining the team. As we grow to the next stage, we are hiring people that are outside of our friend circles, so we'll be working to maintain the culture that we have fostered.
On a day-to-day basis, what does your work look like? What drives you to continue the work each day?
When I joined Cornerstone AI, I was the fifth person on the team. Most of the team at that time was on the data science side, so I was wearing multiple hats on the engineering side. When the team grew larger, I focused more on the cloud engineering side, which includes architecture planning, deployments, and maintenance.
My work nowadays is to make sure we have a stable infrastructure because all of our software is deployed on the cloud, AWS in particular. We also have customers that need deployments to their cloud environments.
What does the future hold for Cornerstone AI?
The reason I joined is I have trust in Mike's vision and capability. He is an expert in healthcare data analysis, so I was pretty sure he would have a big impact in that domain.
We have a pretty solid product now with several big customers recognizing our value, so the company will keep growing in that direction. I think we will have our products in more pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
What are you most proud of in your professional life?
I consider myself a geek. I like to explore and learn new things, so I'm glad I stayed in the healthcare/biotech area with many interesting things to do and learn.
I've been using AWS from the very beginning and getting myself certified for relevant skills. It is interesting to learn what AWS can provide to make your job easier. It used to take a whole team of people to maintain data centers, but AWS gives you these ready-to-use data centers you control from a web console. And it's more efficient and more stable this way. There are other major players on the cloud side like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, which I am less familiar with but I need to know enough to have a good comparison sometimes. You can see all of them learning from each other, providing comparable services, so that gives us, the customers, more choices.
What are you passionate about outside of work?
I am starting to travel more and more nowadays, as I am becoming an empty nester. My wife and I are trying to do more travels to be able to see and experience new things and locations. At the end of last year, we travelled around Japan, China, and Taiwan for several weeks.
It's great that we have a flexible PTO at Cornerstone AI, so we can be a little bit more flexible with our trip arrangements. The quarterly meetups at various cities in the US also mean that I can visit more locations. It's nice to be able to talk to people face-to-face and work on things together at these meetups.