James O'Brien Email & Phone Number

Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom

Mountain View, Ca, Us

A UX Engineer is a experienced engineer embedded in a UX design team. I have worked in the Ads and “Trust and Safety” teams, concentrating particularly on how to integrate generative AI into products and the design process.- A critical priority for Google is preserving the health of the open web, I am creating an LLM based system for measuring that health by analysing the UX of websites.- Designing and prototyping brand safety UX for AdSense, AdMobile and Google Ad Manager. Applying and contributing back to Material and the Ads-specific design system skew.- Designed and prototyped UX for a tool that enables content policy authors to create classifiers without any specialized AI knowledge. Authors can use the tool to create LLM-based classifiers using nothing but their policy text. I designed the UX from a blank sheet, creating the IA and several prototype UX implementations in concert with PM, Research and Engineering.- Implemented “Prisma” a wellness-driven design system applied across all of Google’s moderation tools. The design system concentrated specifically on limiting the mental impact for moderators dealing with objectionable content.- Integrating generative AI into Prisma. Especially concentrating on the automatic description of content and the ability to “interact” with a policy text to explore difficult or ambiguous moderation cases.- Creating tools that enable the labelling of a text or image corpus according to an LLM-based classifier, or the generation of new data if no current data exists.

Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Gb

Five AI is Europe’s leading autonomous driving company. The company pivoted from developing their own autonomous vehicles to providing a development platform to other AV and robotics companies. I led 3D visualisation and other front-end development for the new platform, visualising vehicle planning algorithms and simulation run results.Five was acquired byBosch to form the core of their AV development effort.

Seattle, Wa, Us

Technical lead building future-focused systems for Prime Video.- Working with Design, Product and Engineering teams to architect the UX for the next generation of Prime Video on "living room" devices (Apple TV, Xbox One, smart TVs) and corresponding second-screen devices (iOS)- Built reference implementation of a next generation Prime Video application on web, living room and mobile devices. (HTML5 / React / Node / AWS)- Architected presentation layer framework “Symphony” from abstract design system to concrete React components (Sketch, FramerX, React)- Worked with engineering teams to productise reference implementation. (React Native, C++)- Designed and built REST services to serve media metadata and video content (node.js / Java / Clojure / AWS)- Built corresponding iOS application to explore richer second-screen experiences. (Swift)- Technical lead on user-testing of new concepts. Rapidly iterating prototypes for lab-based testing and web-based A/B tests. (HTML5 / React)- Presenting concepts to Prime Video leadership.

Redmond, Washington, Us

Lead engineer working on one of the most popular messaging apps in the App Store. Responsible for setting technical direction, implementation and oversight of features. releasing to the App Store and monitoring key metrics.- Technical lead on one of the most popular messaging apps in the app store with 4.5 million active users per day.- Led an engineering team of varying seniority.- Responsible for recruiting senior and junior engineers: set requirements with Staffing, interviewed candidates.- Mentored engineers and guided technical career progress.- Architected quality improvement strategy, modernisation of codebase and transfer to Swift.- Responsible for making releases to the App Store and monitoring app metrics with Fabric, Mixpanel and Adjust.(Swift, Objective-C, XCTest, Visual Studio Online)

Redmond, Washington, Us

Senior engineer on Skype’s second most popular platform.- Built video messaging, contact management functionality and integrations with the latest iOS features.- Worked closely with Stockholm engineering team to get up to speed with complex codebase and deliver cross-office features.- Introduced and evangelised Origami prototyping in the feature concepting phase. Created several prototypes to inform our user on-boarding flow.(Objective-C, OCMock, Visual Studio Online)

Redmond, Washington, Us

Built key video conferencing functionality on Surface Hub, a new, strategically important device in the Windows 10 wave of releases.- Worked with a brand new OS and hardware platform alongside multiple teams in Redmond to deliver a tightly integrated product with aggressive deadlines.- Built immersive full screen video calling experiences on 84” and 52” Surface Hubs- Scrum master.

Redmond, Washington, Us

Brought up a brand new Skype client on a completely new platform in a key strategic area for Microsoft.- Built audio, video and group calling UI.- Built group video calling UI in snap mode.- Designed, prototyped and built NUI driven interactions for the "10ft" Skype experience.- Delivered on time for the launch of Xbox One despite acute time pressure: "the best Skype client we've ever delivered" - Gurdeep Singh Pall (CVP Skype)- Certified Scrum Product Owner

This very early stage start-up was developing a cloud-based appointment management system. I was their first engineering hire and was responsible for full-stack development of the web client.

Worked with the Computational Ecology group creating a probabilistic environmental simulator and companion programming environment.- Built massively parallel ecological simulation kernel in F# that enabled ecologists to model large, potentially global, ecological systems.- Created consumer programming API: a CLR framework for ecologists to easily create models for the kernel.- Created Visual Studio based visual programming tool for the framework.Built visualisation environment: a WPF application for visualising the results of a model across a geography.(C#, F#, WPF, XAML, Azure)

Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Gb

Evi created a general purpose expert system to understand natural language questions and deliver meaningful answers. I managed user experience in the early stages of the company, which was subsequently bought by Amazon to form a basis for their Alexa products.- Successfully re-launched trueknowledge.comWithin 24 hours the re-design I led had doubled revenue, eCPM had increased by 50%, pages per visit had increased by 25% and bounce rate had decreased 10%. I provided interaction design, visual design and prototype development, then integrated with the front-end team during productisation.- Designed local search product for web and iPhoneDesigned the first TK product to deliver revenue. Defined functional, visual and interaction specifications, integrated with development teams during delivery.- Implemented knowledge addition web interfaceDesigned and implemented light-weight, asynchronous replacement for onerous multi-stage wizard. Lead to a dramatic increase in quantity and quality of user-contributed knowledge.- Instituted User-Centered Design practicesAnalysed the company's strategic objectives to create a systematic user-centered design framework within which the management, product and development teams could communicate.- Produced feature prototypesUsed our private and published APIs to create feature prototypes in HTML5 and Silverlight using F#, C# and Javascript.

Paris, Fr

Designed and developed a suite of internal web-based tools

Us

XenSource was a startup company commercializing the Xen hypervisor from Cambridge University: Citrix Systems acquired it in 2007. I created graphical tools to manage the hypervisor.- Designed and implemented user-interface for XenEnterpriseEncapsulated a complex technology in an approachable interface. I did all the interaction, graphic design and programming on the project.- Directed redesign of existing interfaceThe existing interface was receiving a very bad response from beta-testers. I redesigned the interface and led the Palo Alto developers who were implementing it. The re-design received a 9/10 feedback score from our customers.- Developed Windows management toolCreated hypervisor management tool in C# using .NET 2.0 and WinForms. The result, XenCenter, can be seen at www.xenserver5.com/xencenter.php.- Interaction Design and storyboardingIntroduced design tools such as personas and context scenarios to encourage a disciplined approach to developing the management software.- Concept exploration for web interfacePrototyped a web interface for the XenEnterprise product using RIA technologies.

Redmond, Washington, Us

Created advanced prototypes with a focus on academic publication and tech transfer.- Researched multi-synchronous collaborationHow do we make applications for collaborative groups characterized by rapid changes in connectivity and synchrony? I created prototype applications exploring mobility, communication, consistency, and user-interface.- Created Joyce: a programming framework for mobile, collaborative applications.Joyce promotes P2P collaboration and selective undo/redo as first class concepts. Applications made with the framework run seamlessly across dynamic combinations of devices, users and synchrony.- Created Activity Service: a daemon that semantically records activity within a systemThe service tracks application activity in a persistent graph structure that reflects data modifications and their semantic invariants. The record is used to provide automatic persistence and system-wide selective undo/redo.- Created Babble: a collaborative document editorEnables unconstrained, multi-synchronous editing.- Communicated research results to specialised and non-specialised audiences.Delivered papers and presentations to the acedemic community and Microsoft executives.