The Long Game: From New Grad to Deputy CTO
Applied Intuition's Deputy CTO Malhar Patel on building a career by staying long enough to make a real difference.
Over his seven years at Applied Intuition, Malhar Patel has held many different roles. His main takeaway, simply put, is that you should stay long enough to make a difference. Malhar sat down with Applied Intuition’s co-founders, CEO Qasar Younis and CTO Peter Ludwig, to talk about his learnings scaling the company and going from a new grad to the Deputy CTO.
While studying electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley, Malhar worked across a wide range of technical domains, from large-scale data infrastructure to reinforcement learning to space technologies to drones. When it came time to choose a direction, autonomy and robotics won.
"Who wouldn't want to see construction equipment or mining equipment do something cool?" he said. "Who wouldn't want to see autonomous vehicles on the road?”
After graduating, he joined Applied Intuition in 2019, when the company was just a small group of engineers. He's been here ever since.
Over the last seven years, Malhar has worn many hats. He led infrastructure and built the data and ML platform that powers Applied Intuition's autonomy programs globally. In the early days, "proper" functions for things like recruiting, finance, and customer relationships didn’t really exist, so he helped there too. He even built our first RL environments then and trained our initial models. Today, he’s the Deputy CTO.
"Every year I've been here, I felt like I didn't know anything the prior year," he said. That kind of learning is possible only if you stay long enough for it to accumulate. For Malhar, the math on frequent job-hopping doesn't really work out: three months winding down, six months ramping back up, and you're out the door just as the real leverage kicks in. "Two to three years is the time you've now understood what's going on. You've started making real contributions. You're now trusted to do bigger and bigger things. And then you restart that whole process."
Malhar isn't prescriptive about tenure for its own sake. When drawn to a new opportunity, his first question is simple: Are you being pushed away from what you have, or being genuinely pulled toward something new?
If it's a push, figure out whether the problem is real and whether it can be fixed before drawing conclusions. If it's a pull, be honest about what's actually driving it. Is it a technical problem? The founders? The location? The compensation? Naming the real reason forces you to weigh the real tradeoffs. “A lot of people fake themselves out,” he said.
Continuing to learn throughout many years at the same company requires active effort. For Malhar, it starts with people. Each time he’s taken on a new role, he reaches out to people who have done something adjacent to what he’s trying to build. When he took on the data and ML infrastructure function, he made a point of talking to one new person every week for the first six months. The goal wasn't to copy what someone else had done, but to understand the patterns for success in different contexts.
“I want to see the best craftsmen and understand what makes them great,” he said. “Then I can take elements of it to make my own version.”
Problems don't always come in a neat box. If he has the context to resolve something quickly, he prefers to just do it. When he doesn't, he believes the first move is clear: Get the context. From there, it's about making sure nothing falls through the cracks — find the right person, follow up, and then close the loop. The standard is simple: Leave it better than you found it.
Join the Team Shaping the Future of Intelligent Vehicles
Applied Intuition is growing rapidly and looking for engineers and other experienced professionals across a range of disciplines. If you're drawn to hard problems in physical AI, across automotive, trucking, defense, construction, and mining, explore opportunities with us.
