Jessica Chan

Full-time · 1 yr 8 mos

• Engineering Manager, GCP Databases - Vector Search / Semantic Query in AlloyDB

  Dec 2023 - Jan 2025 · 1 yr 2 mos·San Francisco, California, United States · Hybrid

  - Engineering Manager in the Google Cloud Platform's Databases organization leading an effort to enable highly performant Enterprise-scale semantic query and vector search capabilities. At first, across Google's portfolio of databases and now focusing on AlloyDB. - Led the team that landed the technical preview and then general availability of AlloyDB's ScaNN vector search index. ScaM is a technology with over 12 years of Google ANN innovation that powers many of Google's most popular products. Our team leveraged this library for vector search and made it available in Postgresql. - Drove adoption of many customers, most notably leading a big box retail account 0-to-1 engagement which resulted in record-breaking speed of adoption and over 20% improvement to their retail web search relevance. Responsible for over $MM in new business. Led database-wide adoption and standardization of benchmark tooling to measure performance and KPIs for vector search workloads across the portfolio. These vector search workloads were novel at the time across the database organization. - Led the NL2SQL engineering team to release the technical preview of AlloyDB's first natural language-to-SQL extension, announced at Cloud Next 2024. Continued development of the product and secured several design partnerships providing key insights into roadmap development. - Led the ecosystems team to connect our database technology to broader first- and third-party AI frameworks, toolchains and integrations so that when GenAI developers think about connecting their applications to data, they think about GCP. The team launched Langchain integrations across the portfolio of GCP databases. Skills: Technical Leadership · Artificial Intelligence (AI) · Databases · Application Development · Engineering Management Understanding natural language support in AlloyDB | Google Cloud Blog Build User Authentication into your GenAI App Accessing Database | Google Cloud Blog Build RAG applications with LangChain and Google Cloud | Google Cloud Blog

IOD (iamondemand) · Freelance

• Technical Ghost Writer

  Aug 2022 - Jan 2024 · 1 yr 6 mos·San Francisco Bay Area · Remote

  Write technical blog posts and collateral for global customers on a wide range of topics, such as distributed systems, security, containerization and application deployment, and more. Skills: Writing

Airtable · Full-time

• Engineering Leadership, Developer Infrastructure, Observability & Reliability

  Jun 2022 - Dec 2023 · 1 yr 7 mos·San Francisco, California, United States

  - Org leader of the Developer Infrastructure at Airtable, a set of teams that own observability, reliability, localization, CI, testing infra, feature flags, and local developer environments. - Managed managers and Sr Staff engineers, TPM and partnered closely with Airtable's Principal engineers to direct organization strategy. - Founded the observability team at Airtable and the reliability program. Responsible for all observability tooling, reliability frameworks and processes to uplevel Airtable reliability for our customers. - Bootstrapped the reliability program which became the number one engineering priority after a series of outages. Hired our first reliability engineer and led eng-wide Code Yellow response to downtime. - Refactored the incident management and production readiness processes and brought 30+ unreviewed postmortems and 128+ overdue action items down 0. Made this sustainable by aligning all of Engineering on brand new incident management SLAs with continuous accountability mechanisms using Airtable. Engineering is now compliant with postmortem and action item SLAs and expectations are clear. PRR adoption grew to 12 new PRRs/month. Team saved millions of dollars in observability metrics and logging costs, and evolved the platform to increase logging platform MTTF from 14 days to over 45 days. - Solved for per-customer proactive monitoring while controlling for cost for our most important enterprise customers to protect them from discovering issues before we do, and executed on client-side monitoring and crash monitoring with attribution, which had been an unsolved problem for years. Skills: Leadership · Engineering Management

7 yrs 7 mos

• Engineering Manager, MySQL Team & Key Value Storage Systems Teams

  Jan 2021 - May 2022 · 1 yr 5 mos

  - Manage 2 teams and 1 manager totaling 13 people + the work of 1 SRE and 1 TPM: one focusing on key-value storage and the other focusing on MySQL storage and provisioning. - Key Value Systems: Working towards deprecating and migrating data from the last duplicative system, which is the last phase of the Key Value Strategy effort I led in 2019. We are building a read-write key value storage system that supports wide-column format so that we can decommission the high-KTLO HBase-backed key-value storage system in favor of our RocksDB-based system. Once this is complete, we will have a single unified key-value abstracted interface with wins in cost, performance, lowered system complexity, and stability. - MySQL: One of Pinterest's oldest storage systems, MySQL hosts Pinterest's most critical source-of-truth data. Currently overseeing a migration to ProxySQL in order to improve developer velocity via this service abstraction that will simplify connections, mitigate failover service interruptions, add the ability to cache and split shards for certain use cases. We also accomplished the first shard split of our largest replicasets, and completed an engineering-led strategy effort to define the roadmap for the next two years. Technologies on the platform include MySQL 5.7->8.0 (Percona), ProxySQL, Orchestrator, Vitess greenfield. Skills: Databases · Leadership · Engineering Management 3 Innovations While Unifying Pinterest’s Key-Value Storage

• Engineering Manager, Key Value Storage Systems

  Oct 2019 - Jan 2021 · 1 yr 4 mos

  - Managed 7 people in the newly formed Key Value Systems team which owns 7 low-level key-value OLTP storage systems. They are critical building blocks of the majority of teams at Pinterest. We optimize for low-latency highly available persistent data serving. - Technologies include: RocksDB as our base storage engine on ephemeral EC2 instance stores, Apache Helix / Zookeeper for cluster management and replication of individual partitions across availability zones on AWS cloud infrastructure, and C++ application code within this framework (Rocksplicator: https://github.com/pinterest/rocksplicator). We also utilize mapreduce / Hadoop infrastructure for batch ingesting large datasets for readonly serving. - After leading a strategy effort as an IC, I led the team to execute on the 2 year strategy which led to a very successful outcome: we deprecated 2 duplicative key value systems (working on the third), reducing ecosystem complexity at Pinterest. Via the migration, latencies across the board for hundreds of use cases were reduced by 50-90%, and we ended up saving over $7M annually in infra and cross-network costs as of 2021 - Grew the team: Went from 5 FTEs to 7 engineers due to the platform growing in scope and customers, and also grew a first-time tech lead. I also continue to continually mentor and sponsor engineers, focusing on more visibility for URM/URG accomplishments. - Contributed to citizenship programs outside of my immediate scope: 1) Concepted and led the pilot and rollout of Agile Transformation across Pinterest completely remotely during the COVID pandemic, quickly adapting to and leveraging remote best practices and my writing skills to formulate the Scrum processes and facilitate feedback, iteration, and subsequent adoption across the company. 2) Identified severe developer velocity hits in our C++ build tooling and formed a task force that is now proactively improving the build, resulting in a 45min improvement in build times. Skills: Databases · Leadership · Engineering Management

• Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Storage and Serving Systems

  2019 - 2020 · 1 yr

  - Led a comprehensive strategy working group that proposed a 3-year plan for Pinterest's future key value platform and am currently leading the team to realize this vision. Analyzed the current service offerings, customer requirements, best of breed key-value NoSQL systems, and identified a path forward to consolidate our key value stores into one unified platform. The strategy was executed in 2020 and saved the company almost $6M in both infra and maintenance and operation costs, addressed growing client use cases and storage/serving demands in a more efficient and scalable way, and provided a simpler unified API that is easier to use. - Led 2 major large projects: Rewrote Java-based service layer to C++ and rearchitected AZ replication. These projects resulted in saving the company multi-million annual dollars in infra costs, reduced service latency and e2e latency by 50-90% for dozens of our clients, and simplified our architecture which lowered operator toil and system complexity. - Day-to-day owner of several large-scale low-level distributed online serving and storage systems serving 10+ million QPS, multi-tenant clusters with 100s of datasets at PB scale. Includes: Terrapin (featured in Designing Data Intensive Applications), a distributed open-source key-value NoSQL system built in-house based on HDFS; Rockstore, another C++-based key-value NoSQL system based on the open-source technology Rocksplicator, also built in-house, which uses Apache Helix + Zookeeper for cluster coordination/replication and RocksDB as the low level storage engine; UMS, a read-write KV system which uses HBase; plus other Java and C++-based stateful storage systems with custom aggregation logic/stateless services which include the use of both remote and local cache. - Maintain, operate and implement new feature development on both stateless and stateful systems which form critical foundations for almost all of Pinterest engineering (ML, spam detection, user-facing features, core data) Skills: Databases · Leadership · Software Development

• Senior Software Engineer, Web Performance Tech Lead

  Jun 2017 - Dec 2018 · 1 yr 7 mos

  Tech lead, responsible for Pinterest Web performance and all dependent downstream services (full stack). Founded the Pinterest performance team to foster a culture where performance is a feature. What gets measured gets fixed. Some highlights: - Architected and implemented a web performance regression testing framework utilizing CI spawn hundreds of performance tests to detect when a new version will degrade Pinterest performance before it is deployed. Caught dozens of bad changes within the first 12 months of launch. - Designed a binary search regression detection system and led 2 engineers to build it. Automatically identify builds that regress performance, saving engineers from having to perform a manual git bisect, effectively parallelizing a time consuming and expensive investigation when a performance incident is surfaced. (ie, push a button and do other stuff while the robot finds out which commit caused a performance regression :) Performance work featured in multiple conference talks (PerfMatters, AltitudeConf, DeltaVConf) - Architected and implemented an event-driven performance tracing server and client library that collects RUM data from our users and reports in real time through a data pipeline that feeds several performance inspection tools, not least of which also can provide end-to-end tracing (using Zipkin framework) joined with backend services for each call. - Led 2 engineers in a massive data migration and validation effort to the new performance client library, catching dozens of bugs and restoring confidence in our top-line performance metrics. - Managed the performance data pipeline, ensuring that the company had full visibility into real-time performance metrics - Helped form the performance program by creating a vision for Performance at Pinterest, defining the team's charter and mission, and executing on ongoing communication in a growing company about the importance of a performant product Skills: Application Development · Leadership · Software Development Notes on Making Pinterest Fast at Perfmatters

• Software Engineer, Web Platform

  Nov 2014 - May 2017 · 2 yrs 7 mos

  Member of the core experience web platform team managing backend web fleet and services, building out the application framework and developer build system, creating testing frameworks, and improving performance and efficiency. Some highlights: - Migrated Pinterest web template rendering engine from Jinja (Python) on the server and Nunjucks (JS) on the client to an isomorphic architecture where NodeJS and the client could both render Nunjucks, unlocking the migration to React. Migration yielded 20% performance gain for the site. Spoke at React Amsterdam and Real World React. - Rearchitected and launched a service as an efficiency optimization for expensive experiment hashing operation that saved the company $500K per year in compute costs. Skills: Application Development · Software Development How Pinterest Switched Their Template Rendering Engine to React - Jessica Chan How we switched our template rendering engine to React How the Top 18 Female Engineers Got Their Start

SquareTrade

• Software Engineer

  Mar 2013 - Oct 2014 · 1 yr 8 mos·San Francisco Bay Area

  Maintain and expand the in-house SquareTrade custom javascript MVC framework and build new custom UI components. Create new applications and add features to existing SquareTrade Javascript applications built with the SquareTrade MVC. Was once called a “bug-fixing machine.” Agile environment. Write javascript unit tests using Jasmine and PhantomJS for existing and new features and modules in both our framework and applications. Ensure javascript, HTML, and CSS browser compatibility up to IE8. Regular code reviews and documentation. Lead architect of Drupal site, write custom Drupal PHP modules and themes, administer and maintain Drupal dev environments. HTML and CSS custom theming and emails. Notable projects as dev lead: Location selector, “Back-To-Top” reusable UI component, Drupal multilingual/multidomain/multisite initiative, object-oriented CSS framework overhaul Skills: Application Development · Software Development

Demand by Design

• Creative Director

  Dec 2011 - Mar 2013 · 1 yr 4 mos

  Design: Created interactive rapid prototypes, production-level comps, and web/mobile assets for websites and mobile apps; designed whitepapers, brochures, email templates, PowerPoint templates, webinar presentations, business cards, and other marketing collateral; created custom graphics illustrations and diagrams; performed branding and identity exercises with clients and executed logo and identity design. Development: Lead website/WordPress/Drupal developer, front-end engineer (HTML, CSS, javascript/JQuery/Dojo), and server administrator (LAMP and WAMP stacks); coded/implemented web designs and hand-coded email campaigns to be cross-client compatible. Collaborated with teams using Git. Management and Creative Direction: Lead release roadmapping and authored creative briefs and phased processes for design and development initiatives. Recruited and built teams of both creative and development contractors. Managed both creative and development teams to accomplish large-scale projects. Authored several winning full-scale web proposals and answers to RFPs. Clients served include: Intel, Huawei, OpenTV, Virtual Ark, Nephoscale Skills: Leadership · Software Development

enableher.

• Founder / Editor

  Sep 2011 - Jun 2014 · 2 yrs 10 mos·San Francisco Bay Area

  Enableher was a publication that features success stories and positive advice and encouragement from women, and aims to inspire others by showcasing our strengths and what we can do. Join our platform by becoming a writer! The types of articles we want the most are stories of things you’ve done that you’re proud of, and how you did it. For example, if you’re in the job of your dreams, we want to know how you got there. If you have a goal and you're right on track, tell us about how you focus or what drives you. If you are a gardener with award-winning tomatoes, we want to know your story. If you’ve found the secret to riches, do tell! And if you’re fit, happy, and healthy, write about how you stay that way. This site is all about women who have done amazing things and aren’t afraid to talk about it. Send me a message to learn more. I'd love to hear from you. Skills: Leadership

AskMissA.com

• Writer

  Feb 2011 - Feb 2012 · 1 yr 1 mo·San Francisco Bay Area

  Writer that covers restaurants, happenings, networking events, and fun places to go in San Francisco. See my articles at askmissa.com/author/jchan/

6 yrs 7 mos

• Editor

  Jul 2010 - Sep 2016 · 6 yrs 3 mos

  Manage a growing team of over 40 writers in fields such a therapy, medicine, psychiatry, etc. to produce daily content. Daily promotions using Facebook, Twitter, and site promotions while staying abreast of social media marketing techniques and directly applying them. Write and edit all content for the site, including product announcements and public relations messaging, community messaging, occasional articles, help files, and daily uplifting affirmations. Track performance of articles and events, and provide writers with guidance and direction. Envision, research, and execute online special events from concept to launch, designing mockups for the designer, reaching out to partners and conducting member activities such as giveaways and contests. Stage and code landing pages in CSS/HTML and manage online event planning and execution. Design and implement success performance and social media metrics, and report results and comparative statistics in order to improve future events.

• Web Development Project Manager

  Mar 2010 - Sep 2011 · 1 yr 7 mos

  Working with the CTO, create and concept product and event ideas to improve the site, add features, launch editorial and partner promotions online, and enhance user experience. Taking these ideas from concept to execution, responsible for developing, writing, and concepting product specifications, managing project schedules, communicating and directing designer and engineering teams, and reporting status updates to business stakeholders. Also responsible for taking PSD files from designer and coding CSS/HTML pages for editorial projects and online events. First to concept, design, and implement internal project tracking system using Zoho Creator which is now used as the sole reporting system for project activities. First to concept, design, and implement internal Zoho Wiki which houses everything from editorial drafts to operational information.

2 yrs 3 mos

• Project Manager / Budget Analyst

  Sep 2009 - Mar 2010 · 7 mos

  Tracked and reported all budget activities for Director of Brand and Corporate Marketing and Director of Demand Generation with an annual budget totaling over $15M to an unprecedented level of detail. Was central liaison between director-level heads of Brand and Corporate Marketing and Lead Generation, Purchasing, and Financial Analysts; created reports for VP-level management Managed the following core marketing operations projects by developing requirements, creating schedules, working with stakeholders, tracking deliverables, owning design and development tasks, and troubleshooting technical and resource challenges: – Budget Tracking and Reporting Tool and Process. Solved department-wide Corporate Marketing budget tracking and reporting issue by designing, implementing, and maintaining robust Excel tracking and reporting tool and cyclical quarterly budget process to meet Purchasing and Financial Analyst deadlines – Marcom Project Tracking. Designed and created scalable Sharepoint interface that centrally tracks all current, completed, and upcoming/recurring projects (currently over 100) for team of 5 project managers; provides senior manager with filterable resource view to report to upper management – Search Engine Marketing Campaigns. Project managed 20+ SEM campaigns by working with stakeholders and vendors to facilitate development, review, and approval of online offers, keywords, ad copy, page design, and vanity URLs; maintained ongoing ROI measurement and review for aging campaigns and made recommendations based on performance metrics – Manage annual budget of $2M for marketing communications group by working with senior manager to track, forecast, adjust, and communicate project-based and operational costs and actual spend against budgets Saved money on vendor costs by personally availing quick-turn in-house custom Sharepoint site and workflow creation, video editing, graphic design, HTML and CSS coding, and writing/editing services

Shareworld Learning Center

• English and SAT Tutor

  Oct 2008 - Oct 2009 · 1 yr 1 mo

  Teach English reading, writing, grammar, literature analysis, and SAT Writing and SAT Critical Reading to students on a one-on-one setting and in a classroom setting. Ages range from elementary to high school. Includes monitoring, assessing, and reporting progress with measurable results; curriculum planning and classroom management skills.

Legend Learning Center

• English and SAT Tutor

  Oct 2008 - Jun 2009 · 9 mos

  Teach English reading, writing, grammar, literature analysis to students on a one-on-one setting. Ages range from elementary to middle school. Includes monitoring, assessing, and reporting progress with measurable results; curriculum planning and confidence and relationship building.

2 yrs 3 mos

• Corporate Marketing Coordinator

  Jan 2008 - Sep 2009 · 1 yr 9 mos

  Lead and execute internal- and external-facing communication projects from conception to execution including corporate marketing newsletters, several customer surveys with giveaway offers, and campaign and collateral tracking systems and communications. Assist with SEM campaign management. Manage outside vendors on a variety of projects ranging from content creation to reporting to campaign execution. Creation and maintenance of Marcom standard operating procedures wiki site. Planned, coordinated, and executed Brocade booth at Storage Decisions Chicago and at Brocade Conference. Oversaw budgeting, shipping, staff, giveaways, equipment staging, and booth design from start to finish. Assist scheduling and planning of Executive Briefing Center events.

IDX Direct

• Customer Care Representative

  Jan 2007 - Aug 2007 · 8 mos

  Worked remotely to provide customer care for real estate agent web application that enables customers to offer MLS access and track and follow up on leads. Answered technical and billing questions, provided light administrative support.

Noble Transciptions

• Transcriptionist

  2007 - 2008 · 1 yr

  Remote transcriptionist completing assignments and meeting deadlines in a professional manner, typing over 95wpm with 100% accuracy.

ETFZone

• Print and Graphic Layout Designer

  Dec 2006 - Apr 2009 · 2 yrs 5 mos

  Designed, edited, and did complete layout for each monthly newsletter that was distributed both online and in print to over 5,000 subscribers and growing; wrote summaries for various asset classes for each issue; graphic design and web GUI design as needed. Executed complete overhaul and redesign of print newsletter and upgraded from Publisher format to InDesign format.

Law Offices of William H. Bachrach

• Legal Assistant

  May 2006 - Aug 2007 · 1 yr 4 mos

  Provided administrative support for a busy law office with hundreds of clients. Duties included filing, graphic design, receptionist duties, court filing assistance, and other miscellaneous projects as needed.

Loose ID

• Book formatter

  2006 - 2007 · 1 yr

  Worked remotely to convert raw author text files to publishable mediums to be distributed on e-commerce website. Quickly ramped up on technical formats which included Word, PDF, Mobi, Microsoft Reader, etc. Had to meet hard deadlines and execute at a very meticulous level of detail.

Bay Area Tutoring Centers

• English and SAT Tutor

  Apr 2005 - Oct 2006 · 1 yr 7 mos

  Teach English reading, writing, grammar, literature analysis, and SAT Writing and SAT Critical Reading to students on a one-on-one setting and two-on-one setting. Ages range from elementary to high school. Includes monitoring, assessing, and reporting progress with measurable results; curriculum planning and confidence and relationship building.

Jessica Chan Studios LLC

• Freelance Web Developer & Designer

  Jan 2004 - Jan 2018 · 14 yrs 1 mo·San Francisco Bay Area

  Over a decade of experience coding, designing, building systems, managing tight deadlines, assuaging anxious clients, working through holidays, invoicing for work, collecting for work, selling my services, growing my talents, loving new creative challenges and turning client problems into beautiful design - Expertise: o Web design and UI design (from landing pages to full sites and applications, UI, Rapid prototyping) o Web development (CSS, HTML, WordPress template coding, javascript/JQuery/Dojo and PHP applications, email templating, eCommerce and shop front-end architectures) o Web, UI and serving layer architecture o Print design (newsletters, magazines, brochures, flyers, business cards, billboards) o Traditional media (colored pencils, pen, pencil) Skills: Application Development · Software Development