Jason Katz-Brown

jasonkatzbrown@gmail.com   ·   510 501 6227   ·   1402 W 26th Ave Apt B-14, Anchorage

• Master's thesis: Dependency Reordering Features for Japanese-English Phrase-Based Translation, supervised by Michael Collins.
• Teaching assistant for 6.00, Introduction to CS and Programming. Students rated me the best of all TA's.
• GPA 4.8/5.0 (undergraduate), 5.0/5.0 (graduate)

• Embedded in data science and polling teams to ensure surveys and models shipped reliably every day.
• Delivered rapid response projects to ensure the campaign's analytics database (BigQuery) and dbt toolset worked reliably and quickly.
• I was proud that my efforts contributed to a major accomplishment: the analytics team database and tooling was highly reliable and our polling and modeling were accurate and on-time.

• Data for Progress is a think tank and pollster, empowering leaders nationally and locally with data and polling to fight for progressive and popular public policy.
• I wrote and published multiple statewide polls of Alaska policy which have been cited widely by Alaska Public Media, the Anchorage Daily News, legislative leadership, Planned Parenthood, and more.
• My polling and writing spanned a breadth of policy areas: oil taxes, education funding, the Haudenosaunee Nationals in the Olympics, Senator Tuberville's blockade on military promotions, the rural subsistence priority, a billionaire minimum income tax, climate finance, emissions target messaging, taxing unrealized capital gains, a corporate minimum tax, the power of oil and gas companies, energy supermajors addressing climate change.
• As CTO, I built Data for Progress's industry-leading polling infrastructure and hired and managed tech team of six so we can run polls quickly and accurately. I currently serve as a senior advisor.

• Led the Organizing Technology team and recruited six engineers to empower everybody on Warren for President with technology to support them in the fight.
• Scaled mobilization — for example, set up automated mailing to invite supporters to their nearest event twice per week, which recruited 18k volunteer shifts over final four months.
• Supported fundraising — for example, made sure every single email address and phone number got onto our lists and enabled novel personalized asks.
• Launched custom web apps — for example, a polling/caucus locator (100k+ lookups) and a hot leads portal (5k+ contacts with new volunteer prospects).
• I pitched in whenever I could — for example, led HQ staff in doors knocked and calls made, and deployed to Iowa to help in-state data team for the two weeks before caucuses.
• We open-sourced our work.

• Helped elect Iowa's first two Congresswomen ever on the Iowa coordinated campaign.
• As one of two people on the Data team, responsible for precinct prioritization, peer-to-peer texting, online volunteer recruitment, GOTV reporting, field dashboards, and security.

• Expanded Resistbot to support contacting state legislators (just text STATE to 50409).
• Responsible for Resistbot's data transition for the 116th Congress.

• Led internationalization and engagement email engineering teams.
• Joined as Airbnb's 16th engineer, conducted more than 1000 interviews, mentored tens of engineers, and set up the first engineer onboarding, documentation, and style guide.

• Founding member of team focused on Japanese translation quality of Google Translate. We improved English-to-Japanese translation quality to be better than all competitors and presented three papers at EMNLP, a premier conference in National Language Processing.
• Developed and launched Google's first Thai translation system and contributed to the timely launch of the Haitian Creole system after the 2010 earthquake.
• As member of Search Quality team, launched nine search ranking changes to significantly improve coverage of synonym matches.

• Assistant coach of the Alaska speed skating team at the 2024 Arctic Winter Games. Every member of the team won a medal.
• Roller skated across most of Alaska's road system, from Seward to Prudhoe Bay to Haines.
• World #1 ranked Scrabble player in 2006. Represented USA at the World Scrabble Championships in 2005, 2007, and 2009.
• Cowrote Quackle, the strongest Scrabble AI, which is actively used by competitive players worldwide.

• Fluent in Japanese.
• Conversational in Indonesian, Mandarin, Korean.