At the heart of an industrial revolution is an innovation that changes everything. Building AI Boston sees artificial intelligence as a renaissance. From the heart of innovation and the mecca of tech learning, we bring you AI for real people. A conversation for everyone. Dr. Andrew Malinow is a seasoned AI and data science executive with a PhD in cognitive psychology from Columbia University and more than 15 years of experience driving innovation across healthcare, life sciences and enterprise tech. He's led an AI strategy and product development at companies like Akio where he developed scalable platforms that dramatically increased the company's valuation. Andrew is recognized for blending deep technical expertise with business acumen to deliver AI solutions that are both practical and meaningful. And today we're going to chat about his latest venture, Junior, an AI powered desktop platform that transforms the job search process by automating LinkedIn engagement. Welcome to the show, Andrew. Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. I am so thrilled to talk to someone with such a relevant product and an idea and such a strategist and I think we share a lot in common. I love the psychology background, by the way. Thank you very much. It's come in handy, although I have had to tell multiple people that I'm not a clinical psychologist so I cannot provide therapy to them. That's probably good. I know in our previous conversations, I'll say I felt like I'm on the couch. So you just have a people, a people knack. Let me just start. Our audience is kind of curious sometimes about, would you consider yourself more of a tech guy or a humanist or where did you start? What were you like as a kid? I'm even going to ask. Oh, boy. So I've always been an out of the box thinker and maybe sometimes seen things a little bit too early, frankly. I was a big picture divergent thinker and came to programming relatively later in life. So I'm both a technologist and a humanitarian. I am maybe an ambivalent enthusiast for technology. So I both recognize and love the potential that it has for impacting the human experience, but I am also one who prefers spending time outdoors and away from screens. So junior is junior represents sort of my attempt to have my cake and eat it too. So it is an AI assisted chat bot. As you mentioned that enables job seekers on LinkedIn to drive inbound requests for meetings with hiring managers and others who may have a job. Hope is that if you can spend less time on LinkedIn scrolling and trying desperately to find a job, you will have more time to be away from your screen spending time with your family being outdoors or doing whatever it is you enjoy doing. Great. I love the work life balance shout out because I can't agree more. I mean, if anything, I'm not an early adopter of tech because of that reason is just if it takes me too long to figure it out, I'm burning calories that I would love to be spending away from screen time. But you have a very human story and a reason for creating junior. Do you mind sharing a little bit of that or? Sure. So it's been a turbulent, a turbulent job market. I've had very personal experiences with that turbulence. I was laid off in 2022 and was unemployed for over a year and ended up having to sell my house. And it was an incredibly difficult time for me. And I had spent hours and hours during that period spending out hundreds of resumes and having very few conversations. Fast forward to February 14th. I had eventually secured a position at a pre seed startup and thought that was that was the job. And unfortunately, they ran out of money and I was laid off in February 2025. So with the recent memory of having lost my house fresh in my mind, I knew I needed to do something different in order to buy my next opportunity. And so I was on LinkedIn. I was still sending out lots of resumes and applying to jobs that I saw that someone had posted that a job hack on LinkedIn was to search by job search type, you know, search terms, but to filter by post and not jobs. And sure enough, I found someone who had posted about a job that they had that was pretty relevant to what I was looking for. So I left a comment on the post and the author got back to me within about an hour or so. We spoke on the phone the next day, had a great call at which point he asked me to send him my resume and to apply formally for the position and using their ATS system. A week later, I had a conversation with the hiring manager. And, you know, while I didn't end up getting the position, what resonated was, wow, I had a phone conversation within the same day of seeing a position that I was interested in and got to a hiring manager very quickly. There's something there. So I built Junior for myself. It was a combination of vibe coding. You'll hear that term a lot. I do. And, and running an open source, large language model locally on my laptop, I deployed him for myself on April 11. And, you know, within two or three days, my calendar was booked automatically through the end of April. Wow. At that point, I frankly, I abandoned most of the job interviews. I thought, my goodness, this is this has been so good for me. There's so many other people in my situation. Everyone should have their own Junior. And thus, thus he was he or she was born. So I'm like really not a tech person, but it sounds like what you've successfully created is an AI agent. And for anybody listening and who's tried to kind of follow along that the building AI Boston audience is pretty sophisticated. But I don't think people run across too many use cases where they can really identify. Oh my gosh, having an agent that really represents me sounds like a good idea. So is that fairly what you would call Junior is an agent? It is. It is. I like to think of himself as sort of an AI duplicate of myself. He's almost me. So he acts independently with my input upfront about how to present my voice on LinkedIn. So he references my professional profile. The interests that I've decided are worthy of him sort of being aware of during his commenting process. But early days, you know, it's not unlike reading a child, frankly, you know, he would go off the rails. And I would have to go back and correct him. But, you know, in sort of the modern vernacular and current day tech speak, he is an AI agent. Okay. And I know a lot of what we do on our show is to kind of quell fear. I mean, people aren't people have every kind of fear from, you know, I don't want to I don't want to interact with Hal or a robot that we're familiar with. It's that's scary. I kind of like that you've struck this balance between authenticity and it's not it's not quite bait and switch, but you've really, I mean, you kind of hack the system. How do you balance between this automation and authenticity? Like what's this? What's what's the process for user experience? Yeah, it's a great, a great question I have. I do think I've struck the balance between sort of automation and time savings and authenticity. So what happens is, junior will leave a comment on someone's post related to hiring. And if the author or someone else just reacts to it, you know, gives it a like or insightful, I don't, I don't interject at all. But if someone replies to the comment, then I immediately take over. Right. So it starts off as an automated interaction quickly transitions to a human one, which I think is really important because it's a really important thing. Really important because there is obviously ambivalence that people have and understandably so about interacting with a bot. Right. We have to do it with customer service agents all the time. But when it comes to making meaningful connections on LinkedIn, I think many people would find it somewhat intimidating or off putting the idea that they're conversing with someone's agent. So, the whole point though is to get to a human conversation as quickly as possible. So he sets up the meetings and then I take over and if that's online by replying to the person's comment or if it's meeting with them on a meeting, you know, during a meeting that junior has set up, I immediately sort of disclose like, Hey, the funny thing is, you know, we're talking about this position. Yes, I have relevant experience with LLMs. In fact, my agent and that has typically been received and perceived well received well. That's that's a good point. And I'm I think that a lot of the inbound stuff that I receive in LinkedIn, you know, that just feels very spammy, but it is obviously just a person giving me their blank. Like no clue that I'm looking for that. So that you've made a very important distinction. Number one, you're you're proffering a post on somebody that's reaching out. So they're obviously looking for candidates and that and that isn't essentially bait and switch when you get on and say, Yeah, my isn't it great that the matchmaker was a bot in this case, because immediately that human interaction is taken into something they actually want to do, which is fill the position. So it's not spammy at all. I think it's the most elegant. And I will just say this shout out, you know, shameless plug. I think it's the most elegant simple solution that I've seen for a sales funnel in a really long time. And again, we're, you know, let's not bypass the human side of this that there is a lot of agony and job searches. How many job searches did you go after in that year? Right. And hundreds and hundreds. And, you know, I think while my focus has been on job seekers, people at the other end of the process are also underwater, frankly, right. So they're trying to hire for a few key positions. They want to do it quickly and they're struggling trying to use keyword filters in their app, you know, applicant tracking system to find people and they're being inundated with fake, fake candidates. And the quickest way to validate that someone is real is to talk to them. And so this idea of having a conversation is beneficial, not just to job seekers, but to hiring managers. A conversation can reveal a lot more about a person than just reviewing their abridged self edited to, you know, two page resume that somehow became the industry standard for how we present our professional self. So clunky when you think about it. Can I just date myself and say I remember typing up a resume and, you know, the interests at the bottom were like juggling and scuba diving. And, you know, that that got a laugh in an interview, but it wasn't like, okay, this qualified scuba diver has just shown up for this receptionist job. Fantastic. You know, we like it's so clunky to look at job history, but I think a lot of people are going to relate to, you know, the fact that you you're super qualified. You've got you're in the catbird seat, in my opinion, of this cross section between tech and then being an entrepreneur yourself and really understanding what a viable idea looks like. But I'm really curious a little bit about your background. You've been in really sensitive areas like data sensitive areas like healthcare and life sciences. What kind of principles or safeguards, you know, kind of guide your approach to ethical AI design in this case. I mean, I like to think of it as to the platform enables the only person who should be responsible for safeguarding your your data and that is the user. Right. So users from a technical perspective, nothing related to authentication and with the system is saved on our servers. It's a desktop desktop app that runs and so your credentials are stored. I don't think that's what people think about when they think about ethical AI and safeguards around data. For me, in this instance, it is the preservation of the integrity of yourself as it is presented in these comments that junior leads. And it is the responsibility of whoever's junior it is to monitor and engage with the comments that he's posting. And there are opportunities for users to tweak and refine the way he behaves and how he comments that they're unsatisfied with how he is currently representing them on LinkedIn. So all the power to the users, right? There's no there's no sort of black box manipulation of what's going on. And so it is the onus is on the user to sort of make sure that he is behaving or she's behaving in a way that does them justice. Well said. And yeah, I mean, again, I think that's why your credentials make it important to pursue being an AI founder. Do you have any advice for other AI founders and who want to use an AI platform in today's market? I think from a from a business and sort of operations and development perspective, there are there just too many free tools available to not do it. Right. Everything needed to build an enterprise scale platform is available at a reasonable price. I have spent very little money on tech. I started off the the application that I built locally for myself was completely open source. I used several I tried several different open source large language models and random locally via Olamo all open source no cost for that. So cost cost is is easy is an easy risk to mitigate to build an early version of a product. I would say what is much more important and indicative of success is your commitment and belief in the idea. And having a commensurate sort of market alignment between your passion and thinking that this tool or whatever your building is important and will be used in the market saying yes, we need that. And sometimes that can be sometimes that can be difficult. I think in this instance, I think I've been a member of the target customer base and I feel like I can see and experience the benefits of it myself. And I know there are many other people like me who would equally realize the benefits of what I've done. So. Yeah. No, I agree. I think being a part and really understanding the inherent problem is key to your success and I can see expansion of this idea. I mean, I think the partnerships and the and the ways to view. I think that I think that the job market is probably the primary source of fear for most people. I really don't think that people would disagree that, you know, a tool like AI isn't going to make improvements across the board from how you order a pizza to find your spouse. I mean, there's there's it seems clear that people have kind of secured are secure in the idea that tools are helpful. And in this case, I just look forward to success stories on your part. I like I like to think about the serendipity of what one chance interaction and in this case, there's not much left up to chance. You've essentially created a pretty sophisticated solution and I'm not going to knock that you're a tech guy but talk to me a little bit about that. Tech. I mean, you you do how much of what you do is vibe coding and then just pure understanding of coding you started out in coding. Is that correct? Although you would say you're somewhat self taught. Yeah, so I am I am self taught I had taken C and T plus plus in graduate school, my dissertation focused on designing developing and then evaluating web based software to teach proportional reasoning to students with learning disabilities and I had no, I had no programming experience at all but my advisor was an old school AI programmer who programmed in Lisbon prologue and so he said, oh, you want to build software take C and C plus plus and I struggled mightily. And I ended up coding my dissertation in like two weeks using flash and action scripting which is a higher level programming language and then for the next 10 years I didn't touch programming at all really. And it was, I guess back in 2015, I rebranded myself as a data scientist that always been sort of very quantitatively oriented, but I've been doing user research prior to that. I've been doing self Python by watching YouTube videos and stack overflow. So, you know, for the last 10 years or so I've been focusing primarily on natural language processing and applications and various enterprise settings, but to the vibe code part. I've definitely been for someone like me who is facile coding and Python vibe coding has just amplified my output exponentially and you still need to check things and they're different models and different developer environment have a different cadence to their output. You know, Claude for sonnet will rip through stuff without checking whether or not you're okay with the changes but oh three and Gemini to point five there. They're a little more respective of your role in in in sort of the development process. So the technical the technical piece has been fun and challenging and has been largely achievable I have two people helping me. But without you know some of the generative AI tools and the vibe coding part it would have taken a much bigger team and much more time to get where I'm at today. Well, I applaud you for being I mean all of that that is not anything that I would dive into or learn on YouTube. So I applaud you for your stick to it. This with that. I mean I think that most people listening, you know, they want to believe that they'll get to a place where that seems intuitive. I try to remind people hey when we started, you know, when the internet came out it was a tool that some people just rejected completely and now we wouldn't. We use our phone for everything and we use it as a computer on the go and so I'm hoping that the AI revolution feels more like a renaissance we always say that on building AI Boston. What are you looking forward to I mean I, I feel like you're at the beginning of something great. And I feel like because of the size and scale of this problem in the world and really just like needing. If nothing else just the human connection side of what you're doing right and that to me filling up your calendar with with actual appointments is so much better than waiting forever for did they check my resume am I going to get a response. Sorry 150 people are ahead of you like there just seems to be something really social about what you're doing. You and I have talked about this offline. Neither one of us really particularly like social media. It doesn't feel intuitive so. What are you looking forward to in this day and age. I think, I think for me, success and that AI renaissance that that you just mentioned will be fully realized when AI and technology actually enables us to spend more time doing the things that we want to do and interacting with people in the ways that humans are meant to interact and that is having a conversation. So I think we're moving in that direction. I think that there's a lot of work that needs to to happen so that's a people we realize. But I think that the logical place for me to start to that end was connecting job seekers to hiring managers because frankly job seekers don't want to constantly submit and tweak resumes hiring managers don't want to sit and review. Thousands of resumes or hundreds of resumes. They'd much rather have both parties would much rather just have a quick conversation and see how good a fit there is. Yeah, absolutely. Have you yourself been on the hiring side? I mean you've got a lot of. I have. I have. I have it. It's funny because I think that there is I personally just believe that the majority of people are are far more capable than they may believe themselves to be that everyone with the right support and tools and resources are people are capable of doing that. And I think that's one of the great things right so it's not it's not difficult. I've never had a hard time hiring the right person for for a position. And in fact, the people that I'm working with now that I hired were secured through LinkedIn through comments right someone got my front end developer commented on a post that was talking about junior and said some really interesting things and followed up with each other and you know, and then you started working with me. It's not. It's not difficult. It's not a numbers. I don't believe it's a resume or personality test or any of these sort of hard metrics we tend to try to use to qualify whether a person would do well in a position. I think you just need to have a conversation and and you know into it what the person is capable of based on how they present themselves and how they talk about the narrative of their professional experiences. Yeah, well said so it's really valuable that you've been on the hiring side I have to and I actually just did a had a conversation with the panel at WPI Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts and talking to grad you know students with degrees that I will never even dream of understanding you know all these things. So, you know, coming up and being human and having a background in a history is so much more interesting and fits no metric right there is no. I mean, if I were to automate this to that degree and not hire this person based on one previous job. That's why people always need to be in charge of the hiring process. You would would you agree. And I also think that you know the the narrative of our professional lives is communicated oral during an interview and yet we're which is dynamic and you can respond in real time and it becomes a lot of almost an organic experience right so you're able to pivot and highlight things from your from your experiences that you may not have anticipated beforehand would have been important to say and you you're lucky. Right if you have the chance to talk about something that wasn't on your resume but is relevant. Yeah, the person just asked about it and that's very that shouldn't have to be something that you hope is serendipitously presented to you right. I didn't include this on my resume but if you just start with the conversation everything you respond with will be relevant to what the person is asking right. It just makes too much sense to move away from limiting paper sort of presentations of ourselves I think LinkedIn have a really robust profile right have communications start in LinkedIn what happens in the hiring cycle Oh did you check out the hiring team. Look at their LinkedIn right you're asking you did on your resume. That's all we need we don't need to then apply to another system have our resume floating around have a process by you know these smart hs systems that are looking for keywords we just systematically filter out all of the person's potential when we do that. Wow, you have really struck a chord with me and of course I hardly agree I really think the human connection is invaluable. The amount of decisions that and processes that the human brain computes and how that relates to a structure like hiring and you know the job force infinitely more valuable than any AI. Research and therefore the to go hand in glove to me you've you again I'll say it again you found an elegant solution and I'm really looking forward to the evolution. I know you are focused. I know that your idea is worthy of you know driving it forward but do you do you want to do any predictive thinking about where this is going to go next for you or what do you hope will evolve from you know solving this problem initially. Yeah, I tie I mean it's ambitious and maybe too ambitious but I would love to see companies like workday and ICMS and all of these hs vendors need to pivot their business models because hs systems are no longer a part of the hiring job seeking ecosystem. As I just mentioned, it should be, you know, LinkedIn is the place where you represent your professional history, it should be as long and comprehensive as you like. Conversations start there and you never need to actually like come up with an hs optimized resume right people are just that that is my that is my hope for LinkedIn. The longer, you know, the longest term vision I think is just that we as humanity strike a happy balance between benefiting from technology and not having lives that are completely beholden to it right where we're able to exist in nature and in real spaces and not feel like we're losing out on something or disadvantage because we're not doing something with technology the way we're supposed to be doing the expectation shifts I certainly think that would dial down the anxiety friend and you've you've won me over I can't wait I'm a loyal follower to junior I can't wait to get in there and and experience that and I would encourage anybody to connect with Andrew on LinkedIn what else can I shout out for you and how can people interface with your unique program. So they can come to check junior out at hey junior dot AI there's they can download the application there they're very transparent about what it does and how it works. You've gone to I've gone to create links to make sure that is compliant with all sort of rules around posting and doing so in a respectful manner and. And so I would in floor anyone who's looking for work who's really struggled with the process and recognizes that pain for eight yes optimizing resume services just a waste of money and don't want to hit the easy apply constantly try something you try something different it works for me and it was really effective so. Wow Andrew welcome to the building AI Boston like alum club because we're going to follow up with you and you have created a solution I think everybody can appreciate and I look forward to many more testimonials about junior and everywhere this takes you I'm so happy that I met you thank you Andrew. Thank you so much for having me it's been a pleasure. Audience land please like and subscribe and follow in our liner notes will give you links to everything that Andrew is just laid out for you and please do check in and don't feel alone in the job search you have met a superpower thank you Andrew. Thank you for joining us on building AI Boston stay tuned for more enlightening episodes that put you at the forefront of the conversations shaping our future.
