Keith Nordstrom - CTO and Founder, Stealth GenAI Startup

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Work Background

Stealth Mode GenAI StartupChief Technology Officer

Jan. 2024RemotePerforming feasibility analysis and pre-seed due diligence alongside a small team of seasoned entrepreneurs and a small team of ML engineers. My role has included documentation and POC design, architecture, product contributions, and some hands-on work, including RAG against container-deployed LLMs, pitch deck creation, and general workflow management.

MarcoPolo NavAdvisor

Jan. 2023RemoteFractional CTO role for a pre-seed startup with an innovative approach to navigation problems at small scales. * Established software architectural practices for locally networking radio frequency devices * Helped develop a proposal for the NSF Small Business Initiative to fund initial experimentation for the team

Stealth Mode metaverse startupAdvisor

Jul. 2022RemoteAdvising a pre-seed startup on initial product, technical approaches, and hiring strategy for a metaverse project. * Established a hiring strategy for the team with a small pre-seed budget * Led and conducted an interview process to vet potential contractors from a tech and delivery standpoint * Consulted on economics model to map potential flows of assets * Oversaw technical aspects of contractor work * Developed a 7 year forecast model for business costs and revenue to inform upcoming funding conversations

PayPalSr. Engineering Manager, Machine Learning and AI

Oct. 2023 - Apr. 2024Led a team of ML Practitioners (Data Science/MLE) to create various metrics around the 400 million merchant products in Honey's catalog. Among the team's accomplishments: * Leveraged deep learning and a latest generation LLM to determine relevance of titles and images for products scraped from the internet * Provided statistical metrics for change likelihood on observed prices and in-stock statuses, increasing the available recommendations to PayPal by 3 million products (15%) * Improved category modeling for more targeted recommendations by using generative AI * Designed a feedback loop for providing rapid response and data understanding to out of stock signals

PayPalSr. Engineering Manager, Product Catalog Data, Services, ML, and Discovery

Feb. 2023 - Oct. 2023Consolidation of interests and focus for PayPal commerce has led to my leadership of four teams: Catalog services, data, ML, and search. I oversee up to 17 reports with a 4-point pillar structure. Lately, in addition to running my teams, I have been involved with product at the highest levels of the company, contributing ideas and helping to build consensus around a business model for Honey, Venmo, and other PayPal acquisitions as PayPal seeks to bolster its market leadership in the payments space.

PayPalSr Engineering Manager, Product Catalog Data and ML

Jan. 2022 - May. 2023My role leading the catalog has changed as the catalog has grown to 400 million products and the scale we work with requires intelligent updating and extraction. With 12 reports, I created a pillar structure beneath me having technical leads on each of three domains broken out largely along technological lines: catalog pipelines, catalog services, and catalog ML.

PayPalSr. Engineering Manager, Product Catalog

May. 2020 - Dec. 2021Boulder, Colorado, United StatesMy role at Honey has continued past the acquisition by Paypal, only focused on the people management side. I lead a sizable group of developers and SDETs on a highly talented team distributed between LA and Boulder. I work alongside a dedicated product manager to design and manage the creation and maintenance of a next generation product catalog, currently mapping ~60 million of the internet's products (and counting). This catalog drives the work of nearly every product downstream of it, like the mobile applications, the web site, Offers, and Droplist. My responsibilities include fostering talent, mentorship, and developing and communicating a vision for how the catalog will grow. I am also working to help teams at Paypal at large integrate with our catalog. Finally, hired by Honey as a staff engineer, I am a part of the design shepherds council that's available to Honey engineers.

HoneyLead/Staff Engineer

Dec. 2019 - May. 2020Boulder, COResponsible for engineers in Boulder and LA building and maintaining the next generation product catalog pipeline backing Honey's Droplist, Offers, and Mobile Applications. * Used hiring, agile methodology, and cultural transformation techniques to grow a tiny team running a large data project at a late stage startup to a vibrant group of 12 engineers and 2 SDETs within a period of a few months * Reduced operational burdens by 80% by focusing on testing practice and operational awareness * Drove the simplification of a vastly over-complex architecture with ~50 graph edges across AWS and GCP into a system deployed on GCP alone with ~20 edges * Aggressively acquired control of the upstream means of data acquisition to enhance quality metrics by 50% * Expanded the coverage of the catalog from 500 merchants to 1500+ * Created a test stub framework by which GCP dataflow APIs might be tested locally

AyasdiChief Architect

Aug. 2019 - Dec. 2019Menlo Park, CA · RemoteResponsible for designing and enhancing a data platform which vastly improves machine learning outcomes; and supporting new products relying on that platform. As some of those products are going to require time series evaluation in a real time streaming capacity, integration of the Timeli platform into the stack is an ongoing effort as well. My role likewise includes evangelism for the platform and the Topological Data Analysis techniques developed by Ayasdi themselves.

SymphonyAI IndustrialCTO and Founder

Jan. 2018 - Dec. 2019Los Altos, California · HybridSymphony Industrial AI is the most recent incarnation of Timeli, after its acquisition by the Symphony AI fund in 2018. * Over the course of 5 months, oversaw the hiring of a diverse group of ~25 engineers, front end developers, data scientists, and subject matter experts, distributed from Boulder, Colorado; to Houston, Texas; to Bangalore, India. * Established architectural design, hiring, observability, and deployment processes to accommodate the rapid growth in team footprint * Independently developed two proprietary algorithms (unpublished) around detection of machine faults due to vibrations and an in-stream semi-supervised autoencoder method to help scale detection capabilities to aa wider range of critical machinery on factory floors * Worked with Fortune 50 leaders at the SAI fund level to vet new products and market opportunities * Served on the fund Innovation Council as a board member * Worked with Microsoft to develop a feature pipeline for Azure to support SAI * Established various compliance certifications, eg. SOC-2 for the company * Partnered with Microsoft to co-sell SIAI products with Azure to top-5 oil companies * Led the merger of the Timeli-based SIAI platform with the Azima acquisition

Timeli SoftwareCTO and Founding Partner

Jan. 2014 - Jan. 2018Louisville, Colorado · HybridFounder, Chief Technology Officer, and thought leader for an early phase startup we began in order to help mid-cap industrial players leverage their stored data for critical insights, rather than simply keep it in Data Historians. * Moved a codebase begun in Europe to the US market; and led the technological and cultural side of creating a growth-focused software company from the bones of a services-oriented one * Assisted with funding strategy and negotiations * Hired a team of architects and engineers to rebuild a hyper-scaleable system for multitenant use * Drove the transformation of a monolithic single machine application into a linearly-scaleable SaaS big-data pipeline capable of ingesting 700,000 measurements per second per ingestion node * Drove a narrowing of product focus from 25 disparate verticals to 2 * Presented both company vision and technical competence at various conferences * Developed strategy around deployment of Machine Learning into our platform * Oversaw the development of various custom applications against the platform * Contributed directly to code and architecture (Scala/Akka/Kubernetes/Kafka) * Presented company progress and tech/product strategy to support our successful exit to the Symphony AI Fund

madsyncTechnical Partner

Dec. 2008 - Jun. 2015Boulder, Colorado · RemoteMadsync was a side project from 2006 that grew into a business, a multi-tenant C# 2.0 application designed to help small clubs manage their membership and communication needs.

GoplayLead/Senior Middle Tier Developer at GoPlay (NHN Entertainment Labs)

Oct. 2013 - Dec. 2014Greater Los Angeles Area · RemotePrimary responsibilities at a new mobile game studio involved building support frameworks for development for around 60 developers expected to onboard in the next year. This included setting up a Jenkins server cluster for continuous integration deployment of games and middleware. As part of this process, wrote a proxy server with express.js for translating and securing requests from Bitbucket's API and tied it in to Jenkins for cascaded deployment to testing servers and staging. Wrote an express.js server to collate html code coverage reports and provide OAuth 2 authorized read access to these reports.

GoplayLead/Senior Developer

Jan. 2012 - Oct. 2013Greater Los Angeles Area · RemoteResponsible for overseeing development of Facebook-compatible API, some UI elements, SDKs in various languages (Ruby, C# 4.0, javascript, PHP). Primary work has been mostly coding with some oversight of junior developers. PHP/Yii against a MongoDB document database.

GiantHelloSenior Developer

Jul. 2010 - Jan. 2012Greater Los Angeles Area · RemoteHired to produce an API for games to interact with on a children's social network.

SourceflowDeveloper

Aug. 2005 - Jul. 2010Hired to take over Java development on the Anthem national direct sales site, which is still running today. Development was in Java Struts 1.x with Hibernate 2.x against an IBM Websphere database. Also built a more streamlined version of the site in 2010 for Kaiser Permanente using ExtJs Direct for presentation with Groovy/Grails controllers against a MySQL database.

www.wdbike.comOwner

Jan. 1999 - Jan. 2010An e-commerce site based on a PHP e-sales framework plus a Java crawler I wrote to populate the products from my suppliers.

Colorado Research AssociatesResearch Scientist

Jan. 2002 - Apr. 2005Here I continued work towards a first-principles understanding of statistics in convective rainfall as well as some simple climate modeling and some theoretical work with respect to the Bouchet conjecture in evapotranspiration. Duties included writing grants for funding, publication of technical papers, and comparative analysis of datasets from model runs.