Jason Katz-Brown
jasonkatzbrown@gmail.com · @jasonkatzbrown · 510 501 6227
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B.S., M.S., 2004-2008, Computer Science)
CTO / Senior Advisor, Data for Progress (May 2020-present, remote)
- 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.
- 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.
Software Engineer, Warren for President (Apr 2019-Mar 2020, Boston)
- 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.
Data, Campaign for Iowa (Aug-Nov 2018, Des Moines)
- 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.
Product Manager and Tech Lead, Resistbot (2018-2019)
Tech Lead, Airbnb (Oct 2011-Mar 2018, San Francisco)
- 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.
Software Engineer, Google Japan (Oct 2008-Sep 2011, Tokyo)
- 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.
- Fluent in Japanese.
- Conversational in Indonesian, Mandarin, Korean.