Contact: bajames@gmail.com – LinkedIn
Skills
- Track-record of innovation
- 67 issued patents in applied machine learning to solve real world problems
- Bootstrap new products / product areas starting with small teams
- Rapid prototyping with hardware / computer vision / ML systems from “science project” to contract manufacturer
- Team management
- Management from Zero to 40 person org (Tidal / Google Labs / Actions on Google / Google Home Automation)
- Set technical strategy for org-scale projects (Tidal / Actions on Google / Google Home Automation)
- Building teams from scratch with intention
- Applied Machine Learning Experience:
- Generative Language Models (Google)
- Last-mile Delivery Robotics (Amazon Robotics)
- Industrial Robotics (X / Amazon Robotics)
- Underwater robotics (X / Tidal)
- Applied Computer vision techniques (X / Tidal)
- Object detection and tracking
- Pose estimation
- Deep metric learning
- Stereogrammetry
- Experimental design, large scale data collection and labelling for machine learning projects (X / Tidal / Google Assistant)
- Natural language understanding (Google Assistant / Actions on Google / Voice Search)
- Voice Recognition (Google Assistant)
- Optical Character Recognition (Nuance)
- Ranking photos by quality and topicality (Google Search)
- Monte Carlo Simulation (X / Tidal)
- Experience building scalable indexing + analysis pipelines with MapReduce and Flume (Go / C++)
- Extensive development / production oncall experience for large scale distributed services
- Proficient Languages - C++, Java, Python, Go, JavaScript, Sawzall
- Creating Developer Platforms:
- Founded PaLM API / MakerSuite](https://makersuite.google.com/) - Generative Language Model Developer Tools
- Founded Actions on Google
- Founded Assistant Home Automation API projects
Experience
Google Labs Engineering Director Language Applications
- July 2022 – Present
- [PaLM API] (https://developers.generativeai.google/products/palm)
- Development Platform for Generative Language Models
- [Blog post] (https://developers.googleblog.com/2023/05/palm-api-and-makersuite-moving-into-public-preview.html)
- [MakerSuite] (https://makersuite.google.com/)
- IDE for Developer Models
Amazon Robotics Senior Principal Software Engineer
- May 2021 – July 2022
- [Amazon Scout] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Scout)
- Applying machine learning and computer vision to scalable last mile delivery
- Safety Certification of Autonomous Systems (ISO 26262, SOTIF, UL 4600)
X (formerly Google X) - Principal Software Engineer
- April 2017 – May 2021
- Applying machine learning and computer vision to solve real world problems
- Founded / CTO - Tidal X Project
- Underwater Machine vision
- Hardware / Software design for remote computer vision
- Experiment design + data collection
- Rapid Prototyping hardware / computer vision systems
- Field work
- Emeritus Tech Lead Manager for X Early Pipeline
- Early stage product development
- Incubating / prototyping early stage hardware / ML projects using small teams
- Due diligence / consulting for acquistions
- Citizenship
- 300+ interviews / Promotion committee for SWE / Roboticist / Directors
- Due diligence / consulting for acquisitions
Google - Senior Staff Software Engineer / Tech Lead Manager
- September 2007 – April 2017 (9.5 years)
- Tech Lead Manager - Managing a team of ~40 engineers
- Google Assistant - natural language voice assistant
- Founder / TLM Assistant 3P Developer Platform (Actions on Google)
- Founder / TLM Smart Home / IFTTT Integration
- TLM for Assistant New Device Integrations / Android Auto Voice
- 3P Integrations (Messaging, OpenTable, Nest, Uber, Android APIs)
- Android Voice Interaction API (video, talk at Ubiquity conference)
- In App Voice Search
- Google Travel:
- Photo and attraction ranking for Google Destinations, Google Now and Search.
- Google Apps
- Authorization and Access control infrastructure for YouTube, Google+, Google Apps sharing
- Tech lead Google Sites
- Google For Work / Google Calendar / Google Gadgets
- Citizenship
- Initial port of Google Overlapping Experiments Framework to Java
- Hiring committee member / 400+ interviews / Promotion committee
- Operations experience running large scale production services (oncall, SRE Handover)
- Due diligence / consulting for acquisitions
Adobe Systems - Senior Computer Scientist / Tech Lead
- September 2001 - September 2007 (6 years)
- Adobe AIR 1.0 - Lead for networking / notifications / multi-monitor support (Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2008 / MIT Technology Review)
- Tech lead for Acrobat Collaboration
- Shared Review - collaborative document review workflow using simple network file sharing
- Networking support (SOAP, WSDL, RSS + ATOM, REST, ZeroConf, P2P)
CoVia Technologies / Principal Engineer
- April 2000 – September 2001 (1 year 6 months)
- Intranet workspaces built in C++ / Java / Server-side Javascript and OODBMS
- Calendar application
- Batch scheduling / billing system
Nuance (acquired Caere) / Staff Software Engineer
- July 1996 – April 2000 (3 years 10 months)
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Document Understanding - Core Technologies group
- Tech lead for Omnipage Pro 10.0 OCR Engine
IBM (acquired Cognos) / Software Engineer + Intern
- May 1991 – September 1995 (4 years 5 months)
- Worked on a system for applying a single SQL dialect across heterogeneous RDBMS systems (Oracle, Sybase, Teradata) including cross database joins.
67 Issued Patents
Education
University of Toronto, BSc - Honours Physics
- Specialization in Quantum Field Theory
Citizenship:
- United States
- Canada
- United Kingdom