About

Chirag Mahapatra is a Co-Founder and CTO at Blaze, an AI-powered community growth and automation tool for web3 projects. With over 11 years of relevant experience, he has a strong track record of solving complex problems for high-growth companies such as Facebook and Airbnb. Chirag has expertise in machine learning, backend, and frontend (web and native) in domains such as Growth and Integrity. At Blaze, Chirag is currently building a community growth and marketing automation tool that seamlessly connects Discord, Twitter, and on-chain data to help onboard new users, launch user reward programs, and understand what marketing and community engagement strategies are working well. Blaze is backed by amazing investors including YCombinator, Bling Capital, Soma Capital, and Dorm Room Fund. Prior to Blaze, Chirag was a Fellow at On Deck and an Engineering Leader at Meta, where he built a platform to track the flow of key account data for training and run time of critical Machine Learning algorithms such as People You May Know and Account You May Follow. He also led the engineering execution for Family Experiences (FX) Privacy, a set of 3 teams spanning 20 engineers, and Project WAFFLE, a cross-company project to make it easier to manage features across WhatsApp and Facebook. Chirag holds a Master's degree in Engineering, Operations Research, with a focus on Machine Learning from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MBA from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He also holds an MS in Computer Science from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka. In addition to his educational qualifications, Chirag has expertise in Senior Software Engineering, Web3, AI, ML, Frontend, Backend, and Web technologies. He has a strong career growth track record and has hired managers and tech leads, turning around Pulse scores for the team.