Jordan Natan Hochenbaum
Machine learning, agent systems, and creative technology.
I lead AI at BetterUp: our AI Coach, the agentic systems bringing coaching into daily work, the platform beneath them, and how we build. I also lead our Harness Engineering team, which focuses on getting our engineers working fluently with agents and our agents operating reliably in our codebase. Prior to that, I built the foundation for our ML/AI organization across recsys, search, and personalization, and led engineering for our core coaching product. Earlier in my career I co-founded Kadenze, was CTO at Nirveda Cognition through acquisition, developed Twitter’s anomaly detection algorithm (since open-sourced and adopted as an industry benchmark), taught for a decade as a professor at CalArts, and completed my PhD in multimodal machine learning and music. Through all of it, I’ve stayed hands-on in code.
Outside of engineering, I release music and DJ internationally as Natan H and Gauss. Based in New York.
Experience
- 2021 —
- VP of AI, BetterUp
AI product, platform, Harness Engineering
- 2018–2020
- CTO, Nirveda Cognition (acquired)
Enterprise document intelligence, multimodal extraction, automation
- 2013–2020
- Co-founder and CTO, Kadenze
Online learning for art, music, creative technology
- 2013–2014
- Machine learning, Twitter
Anomaly detection, capacity engineering
- 2011–2021
- Professor, California Institute of the Arts
DSP, software engineering, music technology, physical computing
- 2009–2010
- Machine learning, Nokia Research Center
Multitouch interfaces, mixed reality, computer vision
Publications
- 2026
- Prediction network to select intervention modalities
Robichaux, A., Sudhof, M., Hochenbaum, J., Reece, A., Black, H. US Patent Application 2026/0105061 A1. BetterUp, Inc. [WEB]
- 2018
- User identity authentication techniques for on-line content or access
Cook, P. R., Kapur, A., Vallis, O. S., Hochenbaum, J. US Patent 10,095,850 B2. Kadenze, Inc. [WEB]
- 2017
- Automatic Anomaly Detection in the Cloud Via Statistical Learning
Hochenbaum, J., Vallis, O., Kejariwal, A. arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.07706. [WEB]
- 2013
- L'Arte di Interazione Musicale: New Musical Possibilities through Multimodal Techniques
Ph.D Thesis. Victoria University, Massey University. Wellington, New Zealand. [WEB]
- 2013
- Arduino in Action
Hochenbaum, J., Noble, J., Evans, M. Manning Publications. [WEB]