New York University Abu Dhabi

Senior Software Engineer at Twitter

London, England, United Kingdom

Twitter

Staff Software Engineer

- Product was acquired by Twitter, to become part of their self serve ads product.
-  Longest serving engineer at startup, second engineering employee, joined during pre-seed.
-  Helped take aiden.ai from idea to market. Also helped grow the aiden.ai team to 10+. Designed the technical hiring tests, and interviewed 60+ engineering candidates.
-  Technical lead, authored the technical specs for several core services including ETL data pipeline, query execution service, the Aiden query language, and our external service gateways.
-  Introduced engineering team to a functional programming paradigm, along with algebraic data type manipulation, and use of simple monad patterns. The perceived value from this is that it made our code resilient to common categories of bugs, promoted highly re-usable functional components, and made the code easy to adapt to the rapidly changing requirements in a startup. It also was highly opinionated, so it provided a clear style guide, and coding convention amongst developers, leading to faster development time, and easier code reviews.
-  Developed the company's coding style guides, engineering design conventions, ticket workflow, and code review processes.

aiden.ai

Software Engineer

- Part of EF8 Cohort in this startup incubator
-  Spent 6 months doing business development and prototyping on various startup ideas including:
-  Natural language to SQL data analysis
-  SAAS voice recognition telephone booking system
-  Slack for voice, for operations in security, movie sets, etc.

Entrepreneur First

Entrepeneur in Residence

- Developed a novel, low-level, deep learning based speech recognition and language modelling system using Tensorflow and Python. This was based on my thesis research in approximate phonetic search through text, audio, and video content.
-  Published research paper showing the system outperforming Google Translate accuracy in an imperfect transcription task.
-  Did business development and technical prototyping in multiple industry directions, including AI assisted voice transcription, automated telephone booking systems, content management for media, language education, and meeting productivity software.

Metalang

Founder

- Built full stack web application designed to replace an actively used legacy API.
-  App required to scale to millions of requests per day
-  Implemented new functionality with a v2 API and web front-end but maintained backwards compatibility

Palantir Technologies

Software Engineering Intern

- <a href="http://Internet.org">Internet.org</a> Networking Team
-  Developed VPN Android app that allows team to analyze networking behavior of products

Facebook

Software Engineer Intern

- Developed client-facing analysis web-app with healthcare team
-  Early adopter of React within the company
-  Undertook user interviews and used in a tight product feedback loop
-  Created new internal data tool for automatically generating fixture based "data stories"

Ling Zhang