Emeli Dral

Emeli Dral is co-founder and CTO of Evidently AI, which builds open-source tools for evaluating and monitoring machine learning and LLM systems. She co-founded it with Elena Samuylova, her colleague at Yandex and at an earlier startup.

Filling a Computer Science Gap at Yandex's School

Dral studied applied mathematics at the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia, which she described on the Datacast podcast as not a technical university but one with many good math courses. To fill the gap in computer science, she enrolled at the Yandex School of Data Analysis. Her first job, as a software developer at Rambler, was "very stressful," she said, because she worried about her engineering skills.

Applying Machine Learning at Yandex Data Factory

"I was super proud that I got invited to join Yandex Data Factory," she said of the Yandex department focused on applied machine learning for businesses. She later worked on industrial AI at a startup with Samuylova. "Emeli and I have known each other for over seven years," Samuylova said on the DataTalks.Club podcast. While Samuylova called potential users when the two started Evidently, Dral built the prototypes and then wrote the code.