Data scientist Daniel Tunkelang leaves LinkedIn to open a health-tech startup

Another prominent data scientist at LinkedIn has left the company. This time it’s Daniel Tunkelang, who most recently was data scientist in residence there. Now he’s working on a startup.

Tunkelang announced the news today in, naturally, a LinkedIn post. His profile says he’s working on a “health care technology startup.” It doesn’t list a name, and it’s not clear who else he’ll be working with.

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“The company is still in stealth, so I can’t share many details as yet,” Tunkelang wrote in an explanation of the new gig on his LinkedIn profile. “But you’re a data scientist, data engineer, or software engineer who wants to transform millions of lives and save billions of dollars through better delivery of health care, then let me know!”

Tunkelang was one of the first data scientists to work at LinkedIn, where he and his team worked on suggested skills, search, and recommendations, among other things. (The term “data scientist,” in fact, was co-coined by one of Tunkelang’s colleagues at LinkedIn, DJ Patil, who coincidentally talked Tunkelang into joining LinkedIn in 2010.) Earlier in his career, Tunkelang worked on search quality at Google, and he was a cofounder of search company Endeca, which Oracle bought for more than $1 billion in 2011.

Tunkelang is the latest data scientist to leave LinkedIn. Several left last year; some have ended up at Salesforce.

Jim Baer, who oversees consumer analytics as senior director of data science and product analytics; and Simon Zhang, the company’s senior director of business analytics, both left earlier this year. Zhang has begun working on his own data analytics startup.

During his time at LinkedIn, Tunkelang was director of product data science, director of engineering for LinkedIn search, and as of February, data science in residence.

The new title reflected that he was no longer a manager. Instead, he explains in his LinkedIn profile, “I helped LinkedIn run the Economic Graph Challenge, selecting 11 winning proposals from 200+ entries.”

In today’s post, he explains that in this role he “considered a variety of opportunities of all stages and sizes, and talked to dozens of people about technology and product challenges.” That’s how he figured out what to do next.

“Ultimately, I found an opportunity that not only appealed to my intellectual curiosity but presented a mission so compelling that I had to rise up the challenge,” he wrote.

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