/resume

Barnaby James

bajames@gmail.com | LinkedIn

Education

University of Toronto, BSc - Honours Physics

  • Specialization in Quantum Field Theory

Skills

  • Managing teams up to 30+ engineers
  • Boostrapping new products / product areas with small teams
  • Ability to ramp up in new areas quickly
  • Experience with machine intelligence:
    • Natural language voice agents (Google Assistant / Actions on Google / Voice Search)
    • Computer vision - object detection / pose estimation / stereo imaging
    • Voice Recognition
    • Optical Character Recogniton
    • Experimental design and large scale data collection for machine learning
    • Ranking photos by quality and topicality
  • Developer Platforms:
    • Founded Actions on Google
    • Android application and platform development on phones / tablet / wearables
  • Experience building scalable indexing + analysis pipelines with MapReduce in Go / C++ / Sawzall
  • Extensive development / production oncall experience for large scale distributed services
  • Extensive experience with engineering hiring and management
  • Guidance for acquistions
  • Languages - C++, Java, Go, Python, JavaScript, Sawzall

Experience

X - Principal Software Engineer / X Project Founder + Tech Lead Manager

  • April 2017 – present
  • Founder + Tech Lead Manager for Applied machine learning / computer vision project to solve a real world problem
  • Early stage product development
  • Founding / leading early stage projects with small teams

Google - Senior Staff Software Engineer / Tech Lead Manager

  • September 2007 – April 2017 (9.5 years)
  • Tech Lead Manager - Managing a team of ~40 engineers
  • Google Assistant - natural language voice assistant
  • Previously:
    • Travel - photo and attraction ranking for Google Destinations
    • Authorization and Access control infrastructure for YouTube, Google+, Google Apps sharing
    • Java Experiments Framework
    • Tech lead Google Sites
    • Google For Work / Google Calendar / Google Gadgets
    • Hiring committee member / 300+ interviews / Promotion committee
    • Operations experience running large scale services

Adobe Systems - Senior Computer Scientist / Tech Lead

  • September 2001 - September 2007 (6 years)
  • Adobe AIR 1.0 - Lead for networking / notifications / multi-monitor support (Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2008 / MIT Technology Review)
  • Tech lead for Acrobat Collaboration
    • Shared Review - collaborative document review workflow using simple network file sharing
    • Synchronizer - disconnection tolerant replication agent
    • Networking support (SOAP, WSDL, RSS + ATOM, REST, ZeroConf, P2P)
  • 20% - Internal social bookmarking site used by 1000+ people in the company
  • 20% - RSS feed service (filtering, splicing, aggregation)

CoVia Technologies / Principle Engineer

  • April 2000 – September 2001 (1 year 6 months)
  • Intranet workspaces built in C++ / Java / Server-side Javascript and OODBMS
  • Calendar application
  • Batch scheduling system
  • Subscription credit card billing system
  • Migration from server-side javascript to Java

Caere Corp (now Nuance) / Staff Software Engineer

  • July 1996 – April 2000 (3 years 10 months)
  • Optical Character Recognition (OCR) - Core Technologies group
  • Tech lead for Omnipage Pro 10.0 OCR Engine
  • Page layout recognition for Omnipage 8.0, 9.0, 10.0
  • Noise removal, layout rendering and quality evaluation
  • Built online OCR service

Cognos Corp (now IBM) / Software Engineer + Intern

  • May 1991 – September 1995 (4 years 5 months)
  • Worked on a system for applying a single SQL dialect across heterogeneous RDBMS systems (Oracle, Sybase, Teradata) including cross database joins.

17 Issued US Patents

  • Selecting photographs for a destination or point of interest / United States 10,510,129
  • Task initiation using sensor dependent context long-tail voice commands / United States 10,490,190
  • Task initiation using long-tail voice commands by weighting strength of association of the tasks and their respective commands based on user feedback / United States 10,297,254
  • Generating and transmitting invocation request to appropriate third-party agent / United States 10,224,031
  • Securely executing voice actions with speaker identification and authentication input types / United States 10,127,926
  • Voice action biasing system / United States 10,089,982
  • Providing voice action discoverability example for trigger term / United States 10,049,670
  • Developer voice actions system / United States 9,922,648
  • Selecting photographs for a destination or point of interest / United States 9,805,428
  • Voice action biasing system / United States 9,691,384
  • Document-authorized access to a shared workspace Various embodiments / United States 9,491,150
  • Selecting photographs for a destination or point of interest / United States 9,483,495
  • Selecting photographs for a destination / United States 9,076,079
  • Content review with proxy comment management / United States 9,130,905
  • Document-authorized access to a shared workspace / United States 9,166,954
  • Method and apparatus for customizing presentation of notification lists / United States 8,244,796
  • Searching a database of selected and associated resources / United States 8,190,602
  • Distributed computing document recognition and processing / United States 6,742,161

Citizenship:

  • United States
  • Canada
  • United Kingdom