Prefect Appoints Adam Azzam as AI Product Lead

Company solidifies strategy and direction for AI initiatives, including oversight of Marvin, its open source library for building AI-powered software

WASHINGTON, June 15, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Prefect Technologies, Inc, makers of the popular open-source Prefect orchestration platform, today announced the appointment of Adam Azzam, PhD as the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Product Lead. Azzam's appointment demonstrates Prefect's commitment to advancing the field of AI and empowering developers and engineers with user-friendly tools and frameworks. His expertise in working with Large Language Models (LLMs) and passion for making complex technologies more accessible align perfectly with Prefect's philosophy of democratizing access to powerful tools.

At Prefect, Azzam will assume leadership of Marvin, an open-source Python framework for building AI-powered software. In order for the Prefect team to facilitate their own work, they began experimenting with high-level APIs to create a better developer experience for working with LLMs. The result was Marvin, a framework that empowers engineers, developers, and analysts to leverage LLMs for developing and deploying software applications. The community response to Marvin has been overwhelmingly positive, with nearly 3000 developers using it to deploy LLMs to production within weeks of its release.

In his role, Azzam will work closely with developers, startup founders, and enterprises to double down on Marvin's growth and adoption as the go-to framework for building AI pipelines which can also benefit from Prefect's core orchestration products. Azzam will further collaborate with the Prefect product team to identify additional opportunities for leveraging AI within the Prefect roadmap to create personalized experiences for developers.

Jeremiah Lowin, CEO and Founder at Prefect said, "Adam brings a unique blend of entrepreneurial spirit, AI expertise, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by developers. His vision aligns perfectly with ours, and together, we aim to empower developers to build software in a declarative fashion, utilizing the immense potential of LLMs. We believe that Adam's leadership will be instrumental in driving Prefect's growth and transforming the landscape."

"Prefect became the backend of choice for data engineers by focusing on developer experience. Marvin has the opportunity to be one of the most impactful developer tools in this generation of software - it lets you build with LLMs in ambient mode, and in doing so cuts the marginal effort of working with LLMs to zero," said Azzam. "Marvin, like Prefect, is rooted in a deep and unwavering empathy for developers and practitioners. Prefect's committed to helping a new generation of engineers productionalize LLMs, and there's no other team I'd bet on. Prefect's vision, track record, and team made it an absolute no-brainer to join and work on Marvin."

Azzam brings a decade of industry, startup, and academic experience to Prefect. Azzam earned his PhD in Mathematics from UCLA before joining Insight Data Science (YC S11) as Lead Data Scientist and later Head of Product. Adam co-founded Openrole AI and served as CTO, productionalizing language models to build an AI career co-pilot for professionals.

To learn more about Marvin and the latest at Prefect, join the company's 25,000+ member Slack community and follow on Twitter at @PrefectIO. You can also learn more about Prefect's culture and how to join the team here. You can also read more from both Adam Azzam and Jeremiah Lowin on their newly launched Substack called FactsMachine.

About Prefect
Prefect is an orchestration platform that enables data engineers to build, automatically run, and monitor complex pipelines at scale. Prefect is used by organizations of all sizes across the globe, and thousands of community members support its open-source code base. For more information on Prefect, visit https://www.prefect.io.

SOURCE Prefect