Jason Katz-Brown

jasonkatzbrown@gmail.com   ·   @jasonkatzbrown   ·   510 501 6227

• 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 highest of all TA's.
• GPA 4.8/5.0 (undergraduate), 5.0/5.0 (graduate)

• 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, from the United States Senate Majority Leader to the Alaska AFL-CIO.
• As CTO, I built Data for Progress's industry-leading polling infrastructure and hired a tech team of six so we can run polls quickly and accurately. I currently serve as a senior advisor.

• Co-taught a web development class remotely at two Bay Area schools through CodeNation, which focuses on setting up computer programming classes at Title 1 high schools that otherwise would have no such curricula.
• I cherished this opportunity, became a much more competent teacher, and was overawed by the students’ creativity and advancement.

• 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 fully 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.
• Ran and analyzed experiments across email and SMS for organizing and fundraising to track and increase conversion to volunteer shifts and contributions.
• Launched custom web apps — for example, a polling/caucus locator (100k+ lookups) and a hot leads portal (5k+ contacts with new volunteer prospects).
• Helped maintain data warehouse — for example, set up data syncs to/from Civis and fixed Redshift performance problems.
• Made every team more efficient — for example, revamped workflows for Vetting and Delegates teams to avoid spreadsheet hell.
• 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.

• Advised data and digital for Indonesia's upstart progressive party with precinct prioritization, WhatsApp outreach, and candidate training leading up to the April 2019 Jakarta city council election.
• PSI won 8 out of 106 seats in the city council of Jakarta, the world's 24th largest city, a stunning result for the brand-new political party.

• Helped elect Iowa's first two Congresswomen ever on the Iowa coordinated campaign under Janice Rottenberg.
• 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 engineering 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.

• 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.
• 9th place in 24 Hours Le Mans Roller 2015 (roller skated 465km in 24 hours).
• 8th place in Finland Ice Marathon 2018 (ice skated 175km in ten hours).

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