Lance Riedel

Lance Riedel Email and Phone Number

Director of Index Serving @ Shopify
Austin, TX, US
Lance Riedel's Location
Austin, Texas Metropolitan Area, United States, United States
About Lance Riedel

Technology strategist and builder. Founded 3 companies, led technical strategy at $XXB companies, and built teams from the ground up to tackle new business opportunities. Unique ability to supply the vision and leadership to connect technology to business innovation. Also a get hands dirty type that still codes and invents. Built multiple search engines from the ground up to push the boundaries of what is possible. From early days at Verity, to Yahoo Research where we built out the first large scale indexing system on Hadoop, then built a new WAND based search engine. Also led the development of the Bambino Yahoo Taxonomy and it's accompanying classifier used for front page personalization, ad selection, and search relevance. At Pinterest started and led the Content Team around content understanding using embeddings (Taste Graph), invented and built out the team for the Pinterest-wide matching/search engine (Manas). Then started the shopping team at Pinterest which has been wildly successful.Built out large teams at leading consumer and enterprise companies to startups, helped start a leading silicon valley tech incubator ( The Hive)Obsessed with Aviation -- Commercial Helicopter Pilot, Private fixed wing. Lifetime of building and working on mechanical projects (rebuilding cars, motorcycles, early member of TechShop, welding, drones, model airplanes)Company Founder and CEO • Co-founded Vantage Discovery with Nigel Daley and assembled a world class set of advisors and investors that include Jony Ive, Evan Sharp and Ben Silberman (Pinterest co-founders), Biz Stone (Twitter co-founder), Jeremy King (frmr Walmart CTO), Rob Goldman (frmr SVP Ads Facebook), and many others. • Co-founded Kosei with Stanford Professor Jure Leskovec and Vanja Josifovski (Airbnb, Pinterest CTO) and led as the CEO from idea to launch and eventual acquisition by Pinterest. • Co-founded Proximal Labs in the big data and matching platform space and acquired by Jive Software• Filed 14 patents in matching and social search space (8 granted so far)• WSDM 2016 Industry Day Chair (speakers included Qi Lu, Ron Conway)• Founding member of the Computational Advertising group in Yahoo! Research; the team published (WWW, SIGIR, CIKM) and created the platform used for matching throughout Yahoo (contextual ad matching, search matching, front page personalization)

Lance Riedel's Current Company Details
Shopify

Shopify

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Director of Index Serving
Austin, TX, US
Lance Riedel Work Experience Details
  • Shopify
    Director Of Index Serving
    Shopify
    Austin, Tx, Us
  • Vantage Discovery
    Chief Executive Officer
    Vantage Discovery Mar 2023 - Present
    San Jose, Ca, Us
    Discovery out of the box. Search transcended for the AI Age
  • Flying R Labs
    Consulting, Advisor And Commercial Pilot
    Flying R Labs Aug 2019 - Aug 2023
    Consulting with a diverse set of companies (Bell Aircraft, LoveFrom/Jony Ive, Evan Sharp (co-founder of Pinterest)) around data strategies, search and recommender systems, and on the flip side building out autonomous drones. Also a commercial helicopter pilot on the side. One project is working with Bell Helicopter to design and build a drone platform used by 1000's of high school students in the vertical robotics challenge. https://www.theavr.org/The others are stealth mode companies and projects
  • Pinterest
    Shopping Architect/Head Of Shopping Eng
    Pinterest Dec 2017 - Jul 2019
    San Francisco, California, Us
    Engineering leader reporting to SVP of Engineering. Engineering leadership for Shopping, Taste Graph, Signals, User Profiles, Content eco-system, knowledge graph, search and ads infra mentor and technology vision mentorVarious large projects at Pinterest leading teams. The theme across these is a strategic leap, selling biz and tech case, bringing together xfn teams team, motivating that team.Shopping eng strategy/vision, cross-functional team leadership with Labs, Discovery, Ads, BD, Sales. Work with executives from top retailers and brands to make shopping successful for Pinterest Partners. Continue to drive strategic vision of the product as well as technology visionManaged the Shopping Eng Team, strategy, goals, technology vision, partnerships. Day to day management of large team of engineers partnered with PMs. Building the shopping vision from 0 to 1 with my PM counterpart and building the team to the first successful releases and now scaling success.
  • Pinterest
    Head Of Content
    Pinterest Aug 2016 - Dec 2017
    San Francisco, California, Us
    Strategically identified the need, scoped, lobbied, and put together the Content Team. Initiatives include Content Quality, TasteGraph/Taxonomy, annotations, user modeling, content understanding, fresh content, embeddings. Content is the underpinnings for many critical areas of Pinterest including Ads, Discovery, shopping, etc Completely revamped our discovery engine (search engine from Kosei my company) to become the engine that runs ads, search, recommendations/graphsage, shopping. Built initial tech, then spent time with engineering leaders and ICs to explain the strategy and tech, and get it from 0-1 and into production. Revamped from keywords to embeddings including graph, visual, and text embeddings to make this all work. Led major parts of the re-architecture of ads serving 2.0 -- including motivating it. Worked across multiple functions, leaders, and ICs to step through technology and vision-- and see it to a complete rewrite in production.Pushed ads strategy to use tastegraph/coteries to be the basic ad targeting unit (motivated it, and built it out)
  • Pinterest
    Head Of Infrastructure
    Pinterest Jan 2016 - Aug 2016
    San Francisco, California, Us
    Engineering leadership for Data Eng, Storage/Caching, Serving Systems, SRE, Core Services, Build/Quality/tooling, Safety, Monitoring/Visibility. Took over Infra and got it to a stable place
  • Pinterest
    Head Of Content Platform
    Pinterest Jun 2015 - Jan 2016
    San Francisco, California, Us
    Managed team responsible for core platforms for content quality, ingestion, and understanding (crawling, entity dictionaries, content quality).
  • Pinterest
    Software Engineer
    Pinterest Dec 2014 - Jun 2015
    San Francisco, California, Us
    Integrated Kosei (company I founded) tech into ad selection layer. Built out a robust indexing and serving layer for candidate retrieval and scoring.
  • Kosei
    Ceo - Founder
    Kosei Feb 2014 - Jan 2015
    Palo Alto, Ca, Us
    Acquired by Pinterest Jan 2015 - Co-founder -Founded the company, fully funded, built team, and tech (IP now powers Pinterest Search and Ad Selection back end)Revolutionize recommendations with deep understanding of what we recommend and to whom. Our first product to market serves beautiful ads that delight your customers in the moments that matter. We do so by learning about your products, customer preferences, and help them discover and engage.Built out a deep technical stack able to process data pipelines from the largest ad networks. Even though a startup, we had top notch quality initiatives, deployment, monitoring and visibility into our systems.
  • The Hive, Llc
    Cto (Founding Member)
    The Hive, Llc 2012 - 2014
    Palo Alto, Ca, Us
    Helped create and launch The Hive.The Hive helps companies with the right data architecture and data science. I worked closely with entrepreneurs, practitioners, architects, and open source contributors throughout the entire big data and analytics ecosystems to develop best practices and frameworks for entrepreneurs and companies.Spoke at conferences throughout the world - Big Data World Show (Malaysia), Hadoop World (NY), DataWeek (SF), talks in Bangalore, Tokyo -- all on using the Hadoop eco-system as an application stack. Architected and implemented the infrastructure patterns used by many of the startups to give them knowledge and systems to greatly accelerate time to market. Worked on developing a re-usable big data stack, recommendation engines, search engine expertise. Developed and deployed a labs environment for The Hive companies to use. Advisor to multiple startups on tech stack, business opportunity, as well as recruiting and how to build out a rock solid engineering org. Also a coach and mentor to founders, helping build out technical vision and staffing with top talent.
  • Jive Software
    Distinguished Engineer/Manager
    Jive Software Mar 2011 - Apr 2013
    Austin, Texas, Us
    Led the direction of the company towards a SaaS, data-driven, and multi-tenant architecture for massive efficiencies, manageability, and feature enhancements. Led the search and recommendation architecture and was a key contributor to re-architecting the scale out of searchable activity streams. Invented and productionalized numerous innovations in the social search and recommendation space. Led the architecture and implementation details for the data platform and search using Hadoop, HBase, Flume, Katta, etc (introduced the company to Hadoop, and trained and built up teams around the data centric view)Filed 3 patents around social search
  • Proximal Labs
    Cto, Co-Founder
    Proximal Labs 2010 - Mar 2011
    (Acquired by Jive Software) Proximal Labs supercharges online communities through web-scale analytics and smart apps that increase traffic, engagement, and community impact.-Architected ETL pipeline on top of Hadoop/Flume to ingest full communities and activity streams.-Integrated full analytics suites, machine learning frameworks, semantic/topical analysis engines.-Created a realtime matching engine that combined topical and social dimensions to find relevant documents and people
  • Flipagram
    Chief Scientist/Engineer
    Flipagram 2009 - 2010
    Los Angeles, Ca, Us
    Bought by TikTok- First As Dotspots, then Gri.pe and Cheers -Where we started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u04V9X6hkoIArchitected and implemented:-Realtime and batch indexing and data analytics using tools such as Hadoop. Included entity extraction, semantic analysis, duplicate detection, complete distributed and auto-updating indexes (continuous indexing of feeds) across 100's millions of news and blogs -Machine learning systems for quality metrics of content. -Geo aware business search with 10's millions of records.
  • Yahoo
    Principal Research Engineer/Tech Lead
    Yahoo 2004 - Jan 2009
    Sunnyvale, Ca, Us
    Led the research engineering team responsible for creating the core matching engine used throughout Yahoo!'s ad systems. Worked in various areas of the search and advertiser monetization domain: ad to page relevance, ad to query relevance, keyword/ad/user profile categorization, click analysis, log analysis, the editorial review process, keyword suggestion tools.One of the first groups at Yahoo to use 1000s of node Hadoop cluster to find insights/matching improvements using the entire yahoo crawl (graph, pages, etc), the search index, click history, etc. and joined to improve relevance. Built out a categorizer based on bid terms to greatly improve contextual ad relevance. Categorizer was then used to bootstrap the Coke project which chose what articles to place on the front page of Yahoo.Co-author of 5 papers on Computational Advertising and 7 patent applications (1 patent granted so far)Architected and developed core components to the next generation of contextual advertising and search advertising systems (semantic analysis engine, similarity scoring algorithm and implementation, page and ad categorizer, ad feature indexer)Awards:Yahoo Super Star Award winnerYahoo Hack Day winnerYahoo Tech Pulse SelectionHack the Culture Winner
  • Yahoo
    Principal Research Engineer
    Yahoo 2004 - Jan 2009
    Sunnyvale, Ca, Us
  • Overture
    Senior Engineer/Tech Lead
    Overture 2004 - 2005
    Us
    Managed a number of projects that categorized/classified the 100's of millions of bidded keyword inventory. Built out large scale ontologies (20k nodes +). Built out a page classifier that was used throughout several products at OvertureWorked on the keyword suggestion tool that advertisers used to discover what keywords to bid on when creating campaigns
  • Verity, Inc.
    Sr. Engineer
    Verity, Inc. 2000 - 2003
    Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Gb
    Served as technical manager and architect with an extensive client base of Fortune 500 and commercial internet sites (40+ companies worked with) for an industry leading enterprise search company. Also led development efforts to integrate Verity search products with industry leading content management systems (e.g. OpenText/Livelink) and application servers (core product enhancements and/or sold as upgrades). Worked on enterprise-wide deployments as well as vertical search at companies such as NASA, Boeing, Pfizer, Deloitte, Verizon, JP Morgan, Anheuser Busch, Oxford University Press, Taiwan Semiconductor, Wegmans, Federal Reserve Bank, HP, Adobe, Rational, Unocal/Chevron, Toshiba, American Institute of Physics, American Chemical Society, Department of Defense, Bank of America, Dell, Monitor, Avaya
  • Fujitsu Technology Solutions
    Senior Engineer
    Fujitsu Technology Solutions 1997 - 1999
    Jp
    Led a team that developed one of the first online coupon systems for grocery stores that tracked user purchase behavior and provided custom coupons.One of the team leads on a full rewrite of Bear Stearns mortgage trading system to Java and Corba
  • Hands-On Interactive Publishing
    Engineer
    Hands-On Interactive Publishing 1994 - 1997
    Developed interactive software that included top selling encyclopedia's - built search engine from ground up, interactive rich media interfaces all in c++

Lance Riedel Skills

Hadoop Big Data Mapreduce Lucene Hbase Distributed Systems Machine Learning Analytics Search Apache Pig Information Retrieval Algorithms Cloud Computing Scalability Data Science Start Ups Online Advertising Solr Software Development Java Enterprise Search Mongodb Cassandra Nosql

Lance Riedel Education Details

  • Principia College
    Principia College
    Physics
  • Beijing University Of Technology
    Beijing University Of Technology
  • The University Of Texas At Austin
    The University Of Texas At Austin
    Aeronautical And Astronautical Engineering
  • University Of Kansas - School Of Engineering
    University Of Kansas - School Of Engineering
    Aeronautical And Astronautical Engineering

Frequently Asked Questions about Lance Riedel

What company does Lance Riedel work for?

Lance Riedel works for Shopify

What is Lance Riedel's role at the current company?

Lance Riedel's current role is Director of Index Serving.

What is Lance Riedel's email address?

Lance Riedel's email address is la****@****ail.com

What is Lance Riedel's direct phone number?

Lance Riedel's direct phone number is +165082*****

What schools did Lance Riedel attend?

Lance Riedel attended Principia College, Beijing University Of Technology, The University Of Texas At Austin, University Of Kansas - School Of Engineering.

What are some of Lance Riedel's interests?

Lance Riedel has interest in Mathematics, Tweetdeck, Technology, Bases, Food, Seesmic, Sensors, Cooking, Startup Founders And Entrepreneurs, Woodworking.

What skills is Lance Riedel known for?

Lance Riedel has skills like Hadoop, Big Data, Mapreduce, Lucene, Hbase, Distributed Systems, Machine Learning, Analytics, Search, Apache Pig, Information Retrieval, Algorithms.

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