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. (My novel Japanese-English translation approach won the Japan National Institute of Informatics yearly translation task and I deployed it to production in Google Translate in 2009.)
• 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)

• I delivered rapid response projects to ensure the campaign's analytics database (BigQuery) and dbt toolset worked reliably and quickly for the 125-member Analytics team.
• For example, launched a dashboard visualizing BigQuery slot usage to resolve analyst complaints around slot contention and rolled out a novel .dbtignore solution to speed up local dbt startup times by 90%.
• Embedded in data science and polling teams to refactor modeling and polling pipelines, ensuring score refreshes and accurate polls shipped every day.

• Data for Progress is a think tank and pollster, empowering leaders nationally and locally with data and polling to fight for popular public policy.
• 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.
• Wrote and published statewide polls of Alaska policy, widely cited by Alaska Public Media, the Anchorage Daily News, and legislative leadership, and on national topics spanning from to climate finance to the Haudenosaunee Nationals in the Olympics.

• I led the Organizing Technology team and hired six engineers as we launched dozens of successful fundraising and voter outreach experiments and Sen. Warren became the front-runner in the presidential race.

• I led the internationalization engineering team. The majority of Airbnb bookings connect a guest and host of different language or country from one another. Thanks to Airbnb's industry-leading internationalization and localization and our relentless experimentation, the marketplace exhibits a reverse language barrier: conversion is higher when guest and host use app in a different language from each other.
• Led the engagement-email engineering team. We implemented Airbnb's first automated email marketing program, which drove hundreds of thousands of incremental bookings.
• Was Airbnb's 16th engineer (when I left, there were about 1,000). I mentored tens of engineers, set up the engineer onboarding program, style guide, engineering core values, code search tool, documentation platform, and code review workflow. And went on a lot of wild rides, like launching airbnb.jp in the span of a week.
• Conducted more than 1,000 interviews for software and ML engineers, engineering and localization managers, and cross-functional Core Values.

• I was a founding member of a new Tokyo-based team focused on Japanese translation quality of Google Translate. We improved English-to-Japanese translation quality to be better than all competitors.
• I wrote and presented Training a Parser for Machine Translation Reordering at EMNLP, a premier conference in National Language Processing. This paper was named one of Google Research's Excellent Papers for 2011. I coauthored two other EMNLP papers: A Lightweight Evaluation Framework for Machine Translation Reordering and Training Dependency Parsers by Jointly Optimizing Multiple Objectives
• 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 a member of the Search Quality team, had the highest level of source-code access at Google, and launched nine search ranking changes to significantly improve coverage of synonym matches. Some were Japanese-specific, like improving coverage of katakana and kanji variants; some were global, like identifying new synonym pairs that translate to the same word in another language.

• Interned twice on the Google Translate team and developed Google's first Japanese translation system.

• Cowrote Quackle, the strongest Scrabble AI, used by almost all competitive players worldwide.
• World #1 ranked Scrabble player in 2006. Represented USA at the World Scrabble Championships in 2005, 2007, and 2009.
• Taught in classrooms across Anchorage School District 60 days as a sub (2023-25).
• 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 Alaska, California, Montana, Wyoming, Japan, and western China.

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