Jan 2023 – Jan 2024 · 1 yr · San Francisco Bay Area · On-site

• Responsible for leading OpenAI's Human Data Operations. Human Data sits within research and is the team that provides the "H", humans, for all of the RLHF work OpenAI does.
• Highlights:
• Research Collaboration
• Partnered with researchers to define and understand their data collection requirements across all modalities
• Led campaign scoping, design, and feedback processes to measure quality and ensure efficient annotation processes.
• Team Leadership and Development
• Led and hired a team to operationally support researchers, including TPMs to consult with researchers and Ops Specialists to run the data collection efforts with vendors.
• Created job descriptions, identified recruiting partners, and stood up new employer of record (EOR) relationships.
• Conducted 1:1s, managed performance, and created growth opportunities for team members.
• Vendor Relationship Management
• Managed vendor relationships in collaboration with procurement, accounting, and legal teams.
• Implemented a new time tracking system, ensured vendor accountability, and negotiated contract terms, converting them to annual agreements.
• Internal Storytelling and Financial Planning
• Communicated the human annotation process internally, partnering with strategic finance, FP&A, and product counsel.
• Humans are darn expensive! I built the annual annotation budget and defined our operational strategy.
• External Advocacy and Public Relations
• Collaborated with OpenAI’s communications, policy, and PR teams, civil society groups, and external experts to craft and share our human annotation story.
• Created and executed a progressive program for data annotators, including vendor auditability, work hour caps, and ensuring all work is compensated.
• Crafted much of OpenAI's response to congressional inquiries about how our models are developed with humans and provided support for litigation and legal inquiries.

Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 · 1 yr · San Francisco Bay Area

• As the Director of Computer Vision Engagements and Field Engineering at Scale AI, I am responsible for the outcomes of three amazing teams and 50+ amazing teammates. I've taken my experience learning every in and out of our labeling platform and customer use-cases my first 3 years at Scale and now get to apply that knowledge owning both the quality and operational delivery of all CV-related customers as well as the customer engineering firepower for the entire company.
• Field Engineering is responsible for unblocking all of Scale's enterprise customers technically, ensuring data can smoothly flow in and out of the Scale platform. Whether that's debugging 3d poses in lidar scenes, or building an ingestion engine processing millions of e-commerce products per day, the Field Engineering team spans a huge breadth of skills and experiences.
• Developer Success was spun out of Field Engineering and is responsible for the technical success of all of our non-enterprise accounts, specializing in Scale's more, well, scalable and self-serve products. When you email support@scale.com or read a page in our docs, this team ensures you have a delightful experience.
• Our Computer Vision Engagement Management team is responsible for the overall end-to-end delivery of our annotated data. We get super into the operational weeds, ensuring we have the right systems in place to meet our customer's demanding quality and throughput SLAs. This team spans multiple countries and has direct touchpoints with every step of the labeling supply chain.
• Scale's early success was built on the back of annotating 2d and 3d-based data for self-driving and autonomy programs. These engagements today are still a cornerstone part of Scale's overall business and revenue. We work with some of the absolute coolest customers today; GM, Toyota, Nuro, Microsoft - and these are just some of the ones we can put on the website!

Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 · 1 yr · San Francisco Bay Area

• As a Field Engineering team, our charter is to be the bridge between our customer's technical needs and what our product can do. Given Scale's business, this involves building high-volume data pipelines, doing image, LiDAR, and other data conversions, writing scripts, and troubleshooting API integrations.
• We're a global team spread between North and South America supporting a variety of very interesting use-cases for some of the best-known brands in the automotive, robotics, and technology industries.

Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 · 1 yr · San Francisco Bay Area

• Leading a team of 5 Field Engineers across North and South America, we had our work cut out for us during Covid. During this time, I received my "Secret"-level government clearance and lead many pre-sales technical engagements across the Department of Defense and other Federal agencies.
• Management:
• I overhauled our interview process for pre and post sales engineers, creating a variety of technical assessments that expose candidates to Scale workflows and allow for open-ended design
• Hired 5 folks across pre and post-sales with our new interview process
• Converted one of our team members from a contractor to full-time, allowing a meaningful quality of life increase for him at minimal additional cost to Scale
• Technical Execution:
• Team doubled down on our framework for doing programmatic quality checks on all image-based work, forever changing the quality bar in these image pipelines. As a result of our work, almost every annotation we send back to the customer has at least 1 check to ensure reasonable output.
• I personally built the data submission and retrieval framework for a large, strategic customer, which handled processing 3 million images, driving a $2MM Q4 deal
• We created a "LiDAR Toolkit" to make creating and debugging Scale 3d Tasks significantly easier for customers - this was one of our biggest time sinks and was a significant blocker on 3d Pilot Success
• Built several internal tools to make the more mundane asks coming our way "self-serve" by our peers
• Fun stuff:
• Lead the team that won "Best in Show" during Scale's inaugural hackathon for my idea of "Super Instructions"

Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 · 1 yr · San Francisco Bay Area

• First dedicated hire supporting post-sales technical success at Scale.
• From a team and management perspective,
• Created the Pre and Post Sales Engineering Onboarding guide used by everyone who has joined Scale since.
• Overhauled Daily Standup Meetings / remote team practices to ensure we have alignment across our globally distributed team, share daily "Priorities" list with the team each morning
• Worked cross-functionally to convert one of our operations contractors to be our next Customer Engineer
• Project Execution:
• Lead the pre-sales demos and technical conversation that secured our first $5MM in the federal space
• Architected and built bi-directional data integrations between our customer's stack and the Scale platform
• Laying the Groundwork:
• Lead the proposal and implementation of StatusPage, created Scale's first incident response plan
• Moved API Docs from Slate to Readme, now 60 pages of API reference, guides, and examples
• Introduced public Product Release Notes to Scale
• Created team-wide code templates to move faster through customer requests
• Created Scale's first programmatic data quality check framework
• Fun stuff:
• Created an integration between our issue management tracker, Clubhouse, and our internal tooling. Following this, I was able to be quoted on their website and speak at their conference later on.

Nov 2018 – Nov 2019 · 1 yr · San Francisco Bay Area

Feb 2018 – Oct 2018 · 8 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• As a manager, I focused on moving from an individual contributor role on the SE team to a coach empowering my team and designing what's next in terms of team structure, processes, and hiring plans.
• I architected and oversaw the strategic technical conversations with Engagio's largest and most important customers to ensure long-term technical success with our products and services. Additionally, I served as the point-person on our most difficult technical escalations and am responsible for ensuring the necessary people and processes are in place and utilized to reach a successful resolution.
• One process change I really enjoyed delivering was a tagging system for every support conversation, I linked my article on Intercom's Developer Blog below.
• During this time, I also wanted to improve my technical skills so I dove into Salesforce and became a certified Admin and Application Builder and taught myself APEX code by building out a data aggregation app.
• Other cool things that had happened:
• Presented at Pendo's National User Conference and received the inaugural "Founder's Award" for being an exemplary customer and advocate of the Pendo platform.
• Won “Overall Favorite” in the company Hackathon for mapping our product data to flexible, reportable Salesforce components
• Represented Engagio at the SiriusDecisions conference in Las Vegas to engage prospects at our booth for the 3 day B2B marketing conference. I do love nerding out on B2B Marketing models so if you're into that too, hit me up!
• Co-organized a "Customer Love" hackathon with our VP of Engineering that resulted in the creation of 12 production-ready product enhancements over the course of two days.

Jun 2017 – Jan 2018 · 7 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• As a Senior Success Engineer, I focused on getting really darn good at my core job, onboarding and mentoring Engagio's second Success Engineer, and hiring our 3rd Success Engineer.
• In addition to that, I learned our Scala codebase inside and out and then personally architected and built out production code customizations to unlock more value for Engagio's most strategic customers.
• During this 8 month period, some other cool things that happened include:
• Presenting at CustomerSuccessCon Boston about the Success Engineering role
• Presenting at Pendomonium Atlanta about becoming a data hero with product usage data
• Winning "Coolest Project" at Engagio's 3rd hackathon for a job change detection system for Salesforce leads and contacts

Aug 2016 – May 2017 · 9 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• As Engagio’s first Success Engineer, I established the role, processes and tools that form the base of how we help our customers and colleagues find success within our products.
• Some highlights from this 9 month period include:
• Handling the resolution and communication of all technical issues and critical bugs to impacted users through 5,500 messages with a median first response time of 6 minutes.
• Created 135 pages of documentation to help me scale, check out docs.engagio.com to see my work.
• Built out API Integrations between Intercom, Salesforce, Pendo, our production data and more for internal stakeholders, I even got featured on https://www.intercom.com/api
• Lead the hiring committee to purchase an Applicant Tracking System (Lever). Among other initiatives, I personally designed the offer letter package used for candidates today.
• Created the “Best Internal Tool” at Engagio’s 2nd hackathon with Node.js and Logg.ly
• Lead hiring efforts for expanding out success engineering team, created full set of employee onboarding for the role.

May 2016 – Aug 2016 · 3 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• The API team at Twilio builds out the developer APIs and SDKs that customers use around the world to power communications. I spent my time diving into actual tickets and working with the other engineers on my team to improve the tests, security, and robustness.

May 2015 – Aug 2015 · 3 mos · Bellevue, WA

• Within the Microsoft Business Services (MBS) group, specifically Microsoft Dynamics, I worked on creating an easy to expand back-end framework for E-Commerce sites. The framework allowed us to easily add additional customer flows and do end-to-end testing. We used ASP.net MVC framework and specifically partial views to allow an easy to customize back-end solution.. I also got to do some front end work for the e-commerce sites which was a lot of fun!

Feb 2015 – May 2015 · 3 mos · Seattle, WA

• Worked with the e-Commerce Solutions Group (eCSG) team to prototype out possible upcoming features to Amazon's mobile app specifically dealing with the ways customers enter and validate addresses. I got a chance to work full-stack with Scala, AJAX JS calls to my back-end, and an HTML Markup language called FreeMarker.

May 2014 – Aug 2014 · 3 mos · Greater Seattle Area

• Worked on Agile team to develop method of integrating image comparison tests into standard JUnit framework. Designed launch configurations and wrote code to automate the writing of tests leading to 250 hours/saved a year writing test cases as well as a sharp reduction in the number of defects that slip through conventional JUnit testing.

Sep 2013 – Jan 2015 · 1 yr 4 mos

• The BookDump is a textbook return service for students and is the first to offer a "pick-up-at-your-door" service that pays cash for your books with a price guaranteed to beat the bookstore.
• I created the website, www.thebookdump.com, from scratch by myself.
• I pitched this business idea at the ISU Business Pitch competition and won "Best New Business Idea" and also pitched the idea at Des Moines "Pitch and Grow Competition" and won 1st place and $1000. The business plan my co-founders and I wrote was a state finalist in the Pappajohn Student Business Plan Competition in 2014.

Aug 2013 – Dec 2014 · 1 yr 4 mos · Iowa State University

• Serve as a student representative for MathWorks products on the Iowa State University campus. Through this position, I interact with both faculty and students to enhance not only their product knowledge, but also provide practical examples and solutions to current engineering issues. Practical examples include demos, educational sessions, and peer mentoring.

Jan 2013 – May 2013 · 4 mos · Natick, MA

• Worked at the MathWorks headquarters in Natick, MA for one semester
• Designed test suites to analyze customer and internal code primarily with graphics
• Provided usability and functional recommendations for MATLAB updates

Aug 2013 – May 2014 · 9 mos · Ames, IA

• Designed web application using ASP.net MVC framework and C#. Gained exposure to agile team environment and participated in daily scrums. Used Microsoft's Team Foundation Server to commit code and participated in regular code reviews

May 2013 – Aug 2013 · 3 mos · Omaha, NE

Mar 2013 – May 2014 · 1 yr 2 mos

• Completed over $4,000 worth of work dealing mostly with GUI's and Image Processing, if interested, either contact me directly or check out my online profile at elance.com: https://www.elance.com/s/shaun314

Aug 2012 – May 2013 · 9 mos

• Designed image processing GUI’s to characterize soot aggregates (stuff that comes out of your car exhaust)
• Image Processing included binary thesholding, characterization and line detection
• Developed full suite of tools to improve usability inside the MATLAB environment

Feb 2012 – Dec 2012 · 10 mos

• Tutored introductory MATLAB and problem-solving class 10 hours/week
• Successfully broke down basic programming concepts to better educate non-programmers
• Led review sessions, proctored exams, and graded homework for MATLAB class