Bo Williams Email & Phone Number

Atlanta, Us

Leading engineering for Revenue & Growth at CNN. Our teams focus on three businesses- direct to consumer, advertising, and commerce (affiliate referral and partnerships). Previously at CNN:July 2023-July 2024 Led engineering for the Foundational Experiences group inside our overall Reader Experience org, focusing on growing our international properties, personalization & recommendation, and our core home page and article experiences on the web.April 2021-July 2023Led machine learning engineering and platform, creating personalization & recommendation capability for CNN.

Atlanta, Us

Discovering and recommending news to CNN users! Join us- we're hiring.

Boston, Ma, Us

Leading engineering teams across Spotify since the acquisition of The Echo Nest in 2014. Notable accomplishments include:* Voice- initial lead team created a mission/vision for the future of voice at Spotify. I built an implementation plan and team for this vision. Started with 2 engineers + 1 research. I staffed a combined team of 30+ through a mix of internal and external recruiting and hiring. I created a leadership group, focusing on mitigation of initial risks, and facilitated the creation of roadmaps in major functional areas (in-house NLU, partner integrations, design & UX research, and ads). Launched Spotify's voice feature in iOS and Android, and made major improvements to how we fulfill requests on partner platforms. Currently working as the tech product area lead (a manager-of-managers role) for voice in our User Engagement mission, focusing on improving our cross-platform Voice user experiences.* The Echo Nest integration- I managed a team of engineers through a difficult and complicated acquisition, finding a home for our work and products with a very high retention rate. 100% of my original team was retained at Spotify three years after the acquisition, and 66% are still with Spotify.* Bootstrapped Machine Learning in Spotify Boston-When we decided we needed to grow a machine learning team and capability in our Boston office, I made the initial three hires to form the core of the team, managed the integration of those hires into their teams, and helped to draft the job description and select a machine learning engineering manager to take over this duty once the initial team was in place.* Growing impactful, effective employees- people on my team have led local GCP migration efforts, mission-level diversity and inclusion strategy and implementation, and a successful cross-functional marketing campaign with major impact on listening time.

I was the second engineering hire on a new team at Progressive Solutions. As the company expanded with more e-commerce and software oriented business, I was brought in to build a foundation of solid engineering practices. Led the development and improvement of our process. Co-designed (with CTO) a RESTful API implemented in .Net MVC for creating and ordering personalized documents. Developed a task management system in Python based on celery/RabbitMQ/Redis to accept orders of personalized documents, marshal final output asynchronously (depending on load, could take up to eight hours), and deliver the order to internal or third party fulfillment systems in multiple formats. Led the project to move our children's product e-commerce site (www.frecklebox.com) off of an unstable and hard to scale integration with a third-party document personalization product and on to our own RESTful API. Similarly, led the project to move our B2B stationery ordering site (www.stationeryhq.com) off of the same package and on to nopCommerce (C#/MVC e-commerce platform) and our own API for document personalization

Waltham, Ma, Us

Brainshark is a market leader in online presentation and training- they take uploaded PowerPoint presentations, provide an easy UI for adding notes and audio, and create videos suitable for online or mobile viewing. I was hired to solve an internal management and resources problem- support escalations and services engagements were draining engineering resources and causing delays in the release schedule. I was asked to serve as a liaison between engineering, sales, and support, and to build a team so that escalations and services projects could be done outside of the product team. Inherited an IT resource to manage application support and release engineering and a database administrator, and also hired two .Net/JavaScript skilled engineers, one who solved support cases and fixed bugs, and one who led services implementation.

Project Lead Engineer in the Technical Solutions & Services department of Pageflex. Responsible for full cycle (initiating contact with customers, requirements gathering, project estimation and pricing, implementation, testing, and support) development of customizations to Pageflex Storefront, a web-to-print gateway for variable document customization and personalization. These included both back-end integrations with the product API as well as front end creation of new workflows.Developed integrations to a number of enterprise-level software packages (automation & MIS) for clients. Educated team on emerging technologies and led efforts to improve process and tools.In July 2009 I moved to the R&D team, where I became responsible for improving current products as well as developing new offerings.

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Responsible for development and maintenance of custom e-commerce, marketing, and variable printing web sites for a variety of clients using the J2EE platform with Kodo JDO and Struts, as well as Python, Perl, and proprietary scripting languages. Division was a rapid application development, team-based environment with project life cycles ranging from four hours to four months. Scheduled projects under strict deadlines and met deliverables on time. Architected sites for new clients as well as adding functionality to existing clients in maintenance. Extensive experience gathering requirements from clients and writing specs.

New York, Ny, Us

Designed and implemented e-commerce, personalization, and tracking/reporting functionality for redrocket.com, Nickelodeon's e-commerce brand. Went from zero knowledge of the BroadVision application server to fluency in every aspect of the product in a very short time. Implemented client feedback and launched functionality under strict deadlines. Developed communication skills ranging from writing functional and technical specifications to serving as a liaison with teams from Cambridge Technology Partners, Context Integration, and Sapient in implementation phases.

Chapel Hill, Nc, Us

Designed and implemented database-driven e-commerce solutions for a major university bookstore using Perl and PHP with MySQL and Tango/Lasso with FileMaker Pro. Developed communication skills in both client service and support roles.