Summary
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Applying an engineer's problem solving mindset to a wide array of problems across all disciplines.
Expertise: machine learning, data science, information retrieval, natural language processing,
crowdsourcing, data mining, distributed systems, operations, manufacturing, supply chain, planning,
forecasting, logistics, transportation, consumer products, ecommerce, experimentation, agile development,
recruiting, organizational design, career mentoring, diversity and inclusion, P&L, IPOs, angel investing,
advising, seating charts, tacos.
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Experience
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Blue Apron
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New York, NY • May 2016 - Present
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Vice President, Engineering
Responsible for all internally-built technology, including consumer products, marketing, customer support,
culinary design, forecasting, planning, inventory, manufacturing, packing, logistics, transportation, data
warehousing, devops, product management, and project management. Member of executive leadership team,
responsible for company strategy and day-to-day operations.
Key accomplishments:
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Grew a world-class engineering team from 30 engineers to 100+ over 2 years. Developed or hired line
managers and directors across multiple functions, including application development, operations software,
QA, DevOps, machine learning, and data warehousing.
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Developed deep relationships with stakeholders across every department in the company, including
marketing, operations, fulfillment, supply chain, culinary, finance, and legal. Collaborated almost every
day with other functions to find "better than the sum of the parts" solutions using ideas from both sides.
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Oversaw the development of a new ECommerce platform, culinary planning and purchasing suite, and Warehouse
Management System to support a dramatically expanded product line, giving customers flexibility to choose
between more recipes and flex the number they receive each week.
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Built a machine learning team to rebuild our forecasting system from scratch to handle significantly more
product complexity. The new system's higher accuracy across multiple regions for both long- and short-term
forecasts significantly raised margins due to lower food waste, higher labor efficiency, and longer-term
contracts. Guided the same team to generalize that system to provide product recommendations to customers,
dramatically improving subscription order rate and reducing customer churn.
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Developed and executed long-term multi-quarter roadmap to re-architect the original, monolithic technical
stack. This allowed us to support a number of new product lines with reduced costs and more stability. In
particular, helped split our consumer and operations application stacks to support a clear contract both
internally and with 3PLs or other ecommerce sites. Developed a strategy for master data, including
business process, data governance, and systems support. Moved our data warehouse to BigQuery to support
unified analytics across our complex business.
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Responsible for technology support for our IPO, including SOX compliance, internal controls, internal and
external audit, PCI, pen and vulnerability testing, data security and PII, and overall SDLC.
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Wrote the Blue Apron Engineering Career Ladder (and rewrote it twice to adapt to our growing team).
Developed a new promotions process from scratch to support self-nomination, peer review, and a more
inclusive promotions committee for decisions.
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Focused on building a diverse, inclusive team, increasing the number of underrepresented groups at all
levels of our team, including our first female director and a new grad class made up of 70%
underrepresented groups. Partnered with Pursuit (nee Coalition for
Queens) to place, train, and hire one of Blue Apron's
hourly warehouse associates onto our engineering team. Since August 2017, served as Executive Champion
for Diversity and Inclusion across all of Blue Apron's teams, offices, and facilities.
Publications and talks:
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Foursquare
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New York, NY • November 2011 - May 2016
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Senior Vice President, Engineering, November 2014 onwards
Vice President, Engineering, January 2013 - November 2014
Director, Search and Data Engineering, November 2011 - January 2013
Key accomplishments:
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Built the team and technology that powered Foursquare's search, recommendations, venue database, location
awareness, contextual search, and smart notifications. Grew the team from 4 to 20 engineers; mentored and
trained two managers.
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Personally coded a significant portion of the Foursquare
Explore search ranking algorithm, infrastructure, and evaluation suite.
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Moved the team towards a metrics-driven search quality approach, then improved those metrics to beat key
competitors (including Google, Bing, and Yelp) both in the US and internationally.
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Moved venue database curation from purely user-contributed to a semi-automated machine learned approach
that dramatically reduced user effort while increasing throughput and quality, both in the US and in
hundreds of countries internationally.
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During the (infamous) app split, led the Foursquare team in developing a new, contextually aware, taste-driven
recommendations experience. Responsible for a multi-disciplinary team including iOS, Android, Web, backend,
and data engineers. Managed a team of 40 engineers with multiple levels of management.
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Developed Foursquare's first engineering ladder and promotions process. Raised focus on hiring and
promoting engineers from diverse backgrounds, for example helping to move us from 0% to 15% women on our
team.
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Primary technology liaison for all strategic partnerships, including business development, contract
negotiation, feasibility, and post-deal execution and customer success (e.g. Microsoft's $15m strategic
investment in 2014).
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As SVP, responsible for a team of 100 engineers across all application engineering functions,
infrastructure, SRE, and IT. As a member of the Foursquare leadership team, responsible for strategic
decisions across the entire company, including product, technology, and partnerships. Key lead on
partnership, fundraising, and M&A projects.
Publications and talks:
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Google, Inc.
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New York, NY • June 2004 - Present
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Senior Staff Engineer and Engineering Manager
Built structured data engineering group from 5 to 35 engineers. One of the architects and key builders of
Google's core representation for structured annotations and entities, the Knowledge Graph, now in use across Google's product
offering. Responsible for both long-term strategic planning as well as direct team leadership, development,
and recruiting.
Key accomplishments:
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Designed and implemented a system for annotating structured information on unstructured documents. Built
team of 12+ engineers from scratch to develop and implement new extraction techniques and drive product
integrations across Google. Extractors range from simple (dates, numbers, measurements) to complex
(geographic information, named entities, sentiment analysis).
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Responsible for Google's overarching strategy for structured data, information extraction, and document
understanding. Engineering lead for M&A in the space of semantics and structured data, including
Metaweb
Technologies in July 2010. Responsible for all areas of due diligence on the deal, post-deal strategic
planning, and on-boarding the team of 25 employees.
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Led the development of a world-class query and document understanding framework that has answered more
than a billion questions on google.com. Built industry-leading systems for extracting facts from
documents, indexing structured data, and parsing queries. Grew and led 10-person team in rapid, iterative
development cycle with nightly builds and evaluations and weekly customer-facing updates.
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Lead engineer and manager for team of 10 engineers building Google Squared, an internally-incubated,
next-generation search product. Responsible for initial strategy and presentation to executives. Built
team, developed "startup-like" atmosphere within Google, and launched
in June 2009. Post-launch, continued to drive team on rapid, iterative development cycle, launching new features
on a bi-weekly basis. Drove the integration of Squared technologies into google.com, leading
to the re-launch
of question answering and better
organization of the search page.
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Helped instantiate the New York Google Goggles
team based on a demo by the lead engineer. Built team from a single engineer to 9 in New York,
working closely with a team distributed across four other offices to build technology and product concepts
that were later integrated into Google Glass and the Android camera.
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A multitude of 20% projects, e.g. gene sequencing using spare compute cycles on Google's clusters,
boot-from-disk version of Google Apps (pre-Chromebook), and an early, simple graph representation of the
entities in Wikipedia.
Talks:
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Entities, Relationships, and Semantics: The State
of Structured Search, with Daniel Tunkelang, Breck Baldwin, Evan Sandhaus, and Wlodek Zadrozny, at
the 2011 O'Reilly Strata Conference.
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The 20% Solution, with Marc Donner and Zach
Lloyd, about the "20% project" culture at Google and the impact it had on our work.
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The Structured Search Engine, an in-depth look
at the collection of projects I worked on at Google, including question answering, Freebase, sentiment
analysis, and Google Squared.
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MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
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Cambridge, MA • July 2003 - May 2004
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Research Assistant
Worked on the Haystack project, a Java- and XML-based information
management client. Research included designing and implementing data model, algorithm, and user interface for
learning patterns for semantic information extraction on the World Wide Web. System allowed users to highlight
examples of data they wished to extract, forming a pattern which could be re-used to extract new information
at a later date. Semantic labels were applied to these patterns, allowing them to be integrated into the
larger framework of the Semantic Web.
Talks and Publications:
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Advent, Inc.
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New York, NY • August 2001 - May 2004
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Senior Developer / Team Lead
Managed design, development, and implementation of "DAX" (Data Acquisition and Transformation), a system for
consolidation and aggregation of disparate financial data using J2EE components. Design included distributed,
multi-threaded, agent-based architecture with centralized administration and auditing features. Standardized
internal business object representations to allow handling of a wide range of inputs and outputs with little
or no new code. Included work with Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs), JSP, JMS, XML, BEA WebLogic, ATG Dynamo, and
Oracle.
Note: Employed part time July 2003 - May 2004 while working towards Masters of Engineering at MIT.
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Storefront Media, Inc.
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Cambridge, MA • Sept. 1999 - January 2001
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Co-founder and CFO
Co-founded e-commerce solutions startup while in school. Lead development of "Natural Fit" software to match a
given shopper's measurements with the correct clothing size. Also aided in development of collaborative
filtering recommendation application. Development work included C++, JavaScript, TCL, and PL/SQL with Oracle.
Managed relations with main client, including technical and product marketing meetings. Presented technology
to various potential investors. Co-wrote business plan (technical and financial sections) as well as
developing sections of main technical documents.
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Advising and Investing
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Hudson River Angels
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New York, NY • July 2008 - Present
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Principal
Deal sourcing, diligence, and advising as part of a partnership of 5 current and former
Googlers. Seed-stage investments include:
- Hyperpublic - sold to Groupon.
- SetJam - sold to Motorola.
- Lucid Software - continuing, raised Series B in 2016.
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Noom
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New York, NY • June 2015 - Present
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Advisor - Engineering leadership, organizational design, recruiting, technology platforms.
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Upsider
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New York, NY • March 2018 - Present
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Advisor - Machine learning, information retrieval, distributed computing,
engineering recruiting, technology platforms.
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Wildcard
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New York, NY • July 2014 - October 2016
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Advisor - Search, machine learning, engineering leadership, organizational
design, recruiting, technology platforms.
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Education
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Cambridge, MA • July 2003 - June 2004
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Master of Engineering Degree in Computer Science, June 2004. Cumulative GPA: 4.8/5.0
Thesis: Tree Pattern Inference and
Matching for Wrapper Induction on the World Wide Web
Advisor: David Karger
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Cambridge, MA • August 1997 - June 2001
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Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science, June 2001. Cumulative GPA: 4.5 / 5.0
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Proficiencies
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Quickly adaptable to a wide array of programming languages, paradigms, and libraries. Specific experience
and fluency (in descending order of expertise): Python (including SciPy and nltk), Scala, Javascript, C++,
STL, Dart/Flutter, SQL, CSS, Ruby, Java/J2EE/GWT, Perl, Bash, Swift, R, Matlab, and many more.
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Deep experience across a wide array of technologies, including highly-scalable, distributed systems,
multi-tier indexing and serving frameworks, web applications, and databases, as well as specific systems
such as MapReduce/Hadoop, and BigTable.
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Expert, practical knowledge of search ranking, information retrieval, machine learning, information
extraction, natural language processing, and sentiment analysis.
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Able to flex between executive-level and front-line management and team building in high-impact,
fast-moving, distributed environments.
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End-to-end recruiting and closing skills from new grad up to C-level.
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Career mentoring and growth for all stages of engineering development, from apprentice through
professional.
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Experience on both sides of remote offices, including communication, project selection, leadership
development, executive exposure, and office culture.
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Proven track record of delivering large, complex projects on schedule.
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Skilled presenter and speaker, both internally and externally. Long track record of strategy presentations
to executives, partners, and investors. External talks on a wide array of topics, from core engineering to
engineering management principles to D&I.
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Miscellaneous
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Mentor for the Fresh Air Fund's job shadowing program, 2014-2017.
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Advisory Board, Pursuit (nee Coalition for
Queens), 2016-present.
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William A. Martin Memorial Thesis Award for Outstanding Computer Science Thesis, 2004.
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Inventor or co-inventor on more than 25 patent applications, including 8 issued.
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Fully built, installed, and maintained own Linux distribution and supporting software from source code.
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Winner of 2003 MIT "Real Complex Planes" competition (category: longest duration).
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Eagle Scout.
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Father of three, passable guitarist, occasional karaokier, and taco enthusiast.
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