Distinguished Software Engineer / Senior Director, Google, 2007 - present
Gemini post-training and product development, 2023 - present
- Currently managing a team of 250+ engineers and researchers working on Gemini model quality, capabilities, and infrastructure.
- Co-led the transformation of Gemini post-training from lackluster to top-tier through concerted effort across modeling, evaluation, data, and tooling.
- Oversaw several major model launches including 1.0 Pro, 1.0 Ultra, and 1.5 Pro, each one being Google's top Chatbot Arena model at the time of launch.
- Landed marquee product features including data analysis and the Workspace side panel.
- Oversaw development of our data and evaluation platform as well as our infrastructure for sandboxed code execution, both now used across the company.
Assistant NLP, 2018 - 2023
- Led a team of 75+ engineers and researchers in rethinking and rebuilding the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) system for Google Assistant, resulting in huge quality gains (example).
- Developed a novel approach for context-aware neural semantic parsing, combining a seq2seq model with a retrieval-based model.
- Introduced a new architectural component for reference resolution over a queryable world model.
- Built all-new tools and processes for data collection and management (both synthetic and human).
- Created an introspectable objects+traits+actions world model to underpin the components above.
- Graduated all of these innovations to the broader organization, ultimately impacting 64% of actions traffic.
- Instigated and drove various other cross-organizational efforts (joint with Search) to revamp our logging, evaluation, and serving systems.
Assistant infrastructure and ranking, 2016 - 2018
- Initiated and led development of the "brain" of the Assistant (spanning infrastructure and NLU/ranking), the system that takes a user's query, considers various possible semantic interpretations and associated responses, and decides what the Assistant should do.
- Built and scaled the LA-based team (managing 15 people across 3 subteams) and the broader team (spanning 3 sites) from the ground up.
- Drove alignment on complex, contentious topics across several sites; prevented costly architectural mistakes; enabled numerous high-impact, strategically-important launches.
- Co-led development of the Assistant platform (including the overall architecture and the first-party feature development platform) alongside several other directors and senior tech leads.
- Co-initiated and co-led a 60+ person, multi-year effort to align the Assistant and Search language understanding and fulfillment architectures, aimed at making it dramatically easier to share technologies (e.g. semantic interpretation generation and ranking), tools/processes (e.g. semantic modeling), and features (e.g. Knowledge Graph answers and Assistant actions) across Google's products.
Vanadium, 2014 - 2016
- Exploratory, open-source project initiated by Larry Page to reimagine multi-device application development with privacy and security built in from the ground up.
- [Novel distributed systems for secure peer-to-peer discovery, communication, and data synchronization; implemented primarily in Go.]
- Co-led design and development of Syncbase, a fully-functional database that makes it easy to synchronize structured and binary data between devices, supporting offline access and secure peer-to-peer sync.
- Key contributor to many other facets of the project, e.g. distributed security groups design (see paper and patent), gosh, and various web, Android, and iOS example apps.
Search ranking, 2011 - 2014
- Led design and development of a novel ranking development platform, revolutionizing search ranking across Google's main search properties (including Web, Image, and YouTube). Now used by thousands of engineers across myriad product areas.
- [Full-stack project: low-level C++ data structures and algorithms, large-scale distributed machine learning, user-facing APIs and visualization tools, deep integration with other systems, extensive documentation, cross-team sales/consulting, etc.]
- Tech lead for a team of 10+ engineers: developed project vision and goals, oversaw software development, led user outreach, mentored fellow engineers, etc. Personally developed large parts of the core C++ and Python infrastructure and APIs.
- Helped develop and launch numerous high-impact ranking changes using this platform, both for Web Search and for other search properties.
Search infrastructure, 2007 - 2011
- Designed, implemented, and launched a novel index selection evaluation framework, enabling the use of standard Web Search quality evaluation tools to measure the effects of changes to index composition.
- [Complex algorithms, large-scale MapReduce pipelines, extensive data analysis, etc.]
- Developed and launched several large changes to the Web Search indexing system, with particular focus on index quality.
- Replaced and substantially improved upon the (now-defunct) Social Graph API in the task of extracting, aggregating, and serving all social graph data publicly available online. As part of this effort, developed and open-sourced XPaF.
- [HTML document parsing, data extraction and reconciliation, large-scale MapReduce pipelines, BigTable-based data storage and serving, etc.]
Google Dictionary Chrome extension (20% project)
- Single-handedly developed, launched, and maintained the Google Dictionary Chrome extension, which lets users double-click any word to see its definition in a small pop-up. Coordinated with Product, Legal, various Eng teams, etc.
- Extension stats, as of October 2018: 4.5M weekly active users; rated 4.4 out of 5 stars; handles millions of word lookups per day.
Miscellaneous
- Various other projects not listed above, e.g. built the first prototype of Fusion Tables, and developed the C++ client library for Google's cross-datacenter file transfer system (both 20% projects).
- Mentored 10+ new-hire engineers.
- Conducted 180+ interviews, including 20+ Stanford on-campus interviews; participated in 10+ new-grad hiring committee sessions.
- Led or participated in 10+ promotion committees.