Featured, the platform connecting over 200,000 subject-matter experts with leading publishers and AI companies, today announced the appointment of Dr. Farooq Azam as Head of Research. The hire marks a significant step in Featured’s expansion from media sourcing into providing post-training data services for frontier AI labs.
Since 2022, Featured has powered fast-turnaround, instruction-driven media requests for journalists and publishers—creating a system where verified experts respond to hundreds of detailed queries each day. That same infrastructure now enables Featured to provide expert-level human data needed to improve frontier AI models.
Dr. Azam joins Featured from DataRobot, where he served as Lead Data Scientist, designing and deploying large-scale AI systems across industries. Prior to that, he spent nearly 14 years at SAP as Principal Solutions Architect, Enterprise AI and Automation, within the company’s Global Center of Excellence — leading AI architecture and generative solutions across the U.S., EMEA, GCN, and LATAM regions. He holds a Ph.D. in Machine Learning and Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech.
At Featured, Dr. Azam will lead research and development for post-training data generation, designing scalable frameworks for dataset creation, evaluation, and the ethical integration of human expertise into AI systems. His work will strengthen Featured’s ability to serve AI companies that depend on diverse, high-fidelity human input to improve model reasoning and alignment.
“Farooq has a rare combination of deep technical expertise and enterprise-scale perspective,” said Brett Farmiloe, Founder & CEO of Featured. “Featured’s expert network was built for deadline-driven, instruction-rich responses — exactly the kind of human data that frontier AI labs need for post-training refinement. Farooq will help us transform that capability into a world-class data infrastructure connecting human expertise with intelligent systems.”
Dr. Azam emphasized Featured’s unique position at the intersection of journalism and AI research:
“I’m excited to join Featured at a moment when the lines between human expertise and machine intelligence are converging” said Dr. Farooq Azam, Head of Research at Featured. “By adapting the same systems that power expert insights for journalists, we can help AI labs build more transparent, ethical, and human-aligned models — while rewarding experts for the value their knowledge brings to AI.”