Brad Willard

Innovative Technologist

I have been prototyping, implementing and scaling software with advanced technologies over the past 15 years.

I thrive in a cross functional environment as a catalyst for collaboration between designers, artists and engineers to give rise to creative and innovative ideas.

In addition to a strong commitment to diversity and mentorship, I have managed and grown several teams to become intrinsically motivated and autonomous to produce quality products that focus on creativity, robustness, and scale.

Collaborate

I’ve developed skills to motivate teams to push their creative limits and give life to ideas and ways of thinking that wouldn’t exist otherwise. It’s not about having the best ideas, it’s about helping teams find them.

Design

I believe that balance, modularization, and beauty are not only important in good technology, but are also essential in communicating new ideas that don’t yet exist to get them built.

Innovate

I prefer to rapidly iterate on ideas using state of the art technologies leveraging data at scale with machine learning. However some of the best ideas are still found finding new ways to combine existing technologies in ways you didn’t expect.

Experience

Squarespace / Machine Learning Team Lead

Discovering ways to leverage our extensive data at Squarespace to create a better product experience for our customers blending applied machine learning and research. We currently focus on representation learning in both the NLP and Computer Vision domains to make recommendations and predictions.

GetGlue / Sr. Software Engineer

Performed a wide variety of tasks either improving existing or creating new features of the product to run on Amazon's cloud infrastructure to handle the "thundering herd" problem. Projects included topic trending detection and forecasting, who to follow recommendations, check-in recommendations, spam comment filtering, image quality processing improvements, and complex sticker unlocking dynamics.

L-1 Identity Solutions / Sr. Software Engineer

Redesigned their Biometric Search Engine to a truly distributed event based asynchronous architecture that dynamically optimized complex transactions and partitioned blocking dependencies. This led to a system that automatically minimized latency while maximizing both concurrency and throughput. With the addition of adaptive scaling for different transaction types the infrastructure became part of some of the largest biometric systems in the world with efficient scaling characteristics.

Partsearch Technologies / Software Engineer

Modernized external client integration from brittle batched daily ETL to an iterative real-time messaging infrastructure. This improved both data ingestion latency, and increase error resilience and data availability. Changed internal data analysis from ad-hoc queries against a denormalized database to a standardized olap data warehouse.

Technologies

Machine Learning

Keras / Tensorflow / Scikit Learn Representation Learning / Computer Vision / NLP

Distributed Computation and Data

Spark / Hadoop / Elastic Search / Mongo / AWS

Languages

Python / SQL / Java (it’s been a while) / Javascript (for fun)

Microservices

Docker / Kubernetes REST / Swagger / Prometheus

Say Hi

I love learning about interesting projects and collaborations that involve a wide skill set beyond just the technical. Let’s dream big together.