Feb 2024 – Jan 2026 · 1 yr 11 mos · Los Angeles, CA · Remote

• Collaya was an early-stage startup focused on AI-powered music ideation and collaboration. As Technical Co-founder, I owned end-to-end engineering: system architecture, ML research and model development, backend and frontend implementation, and AWS infrastructure. I designed and built pipelines for audio analysis, ML pipelines for recommendation, and creative tooling, while also shaping technical strategy, execution priorities, and feasibility tradeoffs in close partnership with product leadership.

Aug 2021 – Feb 2024 · 2 yrs 6 mos

• I led a 60+ person engineering team which owned content for Pandora, Stitcher Podcasts, and some parts of SiriusXM. I divided my team into 3 orgs: Content Creators, Content Ingestion, and Content Understanding.
• The Creators Org owned enablement tools and services for content creators, including consumer grade analytics dashboards and promotion tools (the AMP Platform - https://www.ampplaybook.com) for artists and labels, content management tools for both internal and external users, and internal tools for creating listening experiences (stations and playlists)
• The Ingestion Org owned ingesting content (audio assets and metadata, podcasts, album art, bios, etc) from external sources and making the content and meta available to internal services.
• The Content Understanding Org owned organizing the content, including leveraging machine learning for content tagging, managing content rights, and delivering the content catalog and assets at high scale and high availability.
• Additionally, the team as instrumental in delivering the content for the new version of the SiriusXM digital app launched in Dec. 2023

Aug 2019 – Aug 2021 · 2 yrs

• I led a 25 person engineering team which owned Creators Enablement tools, services, and data analytics for Pandora and SiriusXM streaming service.
• This org delivered consumer grade analytics dashboards and promotion tools (the AMP Platform), content management tools for both internal and external users, and internal tools for creating listening experiences (stations and playlists)

May 2018 – Jul 2019 · 1 yr 2 mos

• I led an org which owned all tooling for Pandora - including Creators Enablement tools (both external audience/consumer grade and internal audiences), content management tools for both internal and external users, and internal tools for creating listening experiences (stations and playlists), and Ads Tooling.
• Additionally, the org created a UI framework to enable rapid development of new tooling with a consistent look and feel.

Oct 2015 – May 2018 · 2 yrs 7 mos

• Led a team which built the Creators Enablement tools, data analytics, and services for Pandora. We delivered the AMP Platform (https://www.ampplaybook.com)

Nov 2006 – Oct 2015 · 8 yrs 11 mos

• contributed to many parts of the Pandora service - a rough list in rough order:
• the initial Pandora flash web player
• implemented the first audio ad on Pandora. This code went on to deliver an untold number of audio ads through the years and was a key source of Pandora revenue
• implemented the first video ad on Pandora
• part of a two person team which built the initial independent artist submission tools
• for a period of time I was the sole Android developer for Pandora. Among other things I implemented audio ads for the Pandora Android client
• part of a team which implemented the second version of the Pandora web player (the non-flash html5 verson circa 2010)
• led a team which built Pandora's advertising order managment system, allowing Pandora to greatly scale its ads operations
• prior to managing the Creators team, I was the lead engineer on the team delivering the initial version of the AMP Platform's analytics dashboards
• built Itermon, a project management and software engineer resourcing planning platform used by many teams - still in use today!
• I probably forgot some stuff. was a small team doing a lot over the years

Jan 2004 – Nov 2006 · 2 yrs 10 mos

• part of an engineering team which built ML models and tooling for optimizing advertising campaigns

Jan 2002 – Jan 2004 · 2 yrs

Jan 2000 – Jan 2002 · 2 yrs

Jun 1998 – Jun 2000 · 2 yrs

Jun 1996 – Jun 1998 · 2 yrs

Jun 1995 – Jun 1996 · 1 yr

Jun 1994 – Jun 1995 · 1 yr · Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States

Sep 1992 – Jun 1994 · 1 yr 9 mos · Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States

Jun 1987 – Aug 1992 · 5 yrs 2 mos · Rhinelander, Wisconsin, United States