Seems like DataRobot is building their team directly from Kaggle's leaderboard [1]. Yet another top Kaggle competitor the article doesn't mention who joined DataRobot is Xavier Conort, who was ranked #1 for a very long time.

I'm very curious to see how they go about automating preprocessing and identifying algorithms to use, as I thought this step was part of the hard-to-automate magic that separates your data scientists from data analyst/statistician/etc.?

[1] https://www.kaggle.com/users