Nicholas Byrd Email & Phone Number

* Led a team of 10-12 engineers through multiple impactful re-orgs* Working to set/communicate team strategy, ensure a strong project pipeline, coach/develop team, build effective and lightweight processes for execution* Team is focused on NLP query understanding including LLM training/serving platform, span segmentation/span labeling, span identification, whole-query classification.Community Contributions:* Member of Leadership Activation Working Group, promoting leadership growth in the Pittsburgh office* Started two successful employee book clubs: management/leadership and technical* Led a leadership support/education cohort

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States

Pittsburgh, Pa

I focus primarily on query understanding for queries about products and have a diverse set of projects. Among them:* I lead all shopping query classification efforts (typically ML models) originating from our Pittsburgh office (team of 5 engineers and 1 program manager). Some of our more exciting recent team projects include: - Updated our ML infrastructure to cutting-edge Google technologies - Determined a process for building ML models in new product areas where we have extremely limited data - Predicting into a hierarchical label space where observed labels are only at the leaves - Migration between taxonomies* Designed the API for general shopping query understanding at Google.* Implemented the core workflow engine used to service the API* Streamlined internationalization efforts, allowing engineers to iterate quickly on launches in new countries* Organized a large-scale migration from one form of brand identifier to another* Created a process for tracking and managing bugs/technical debt throughout the team* Own and maintain a legacy infrastructure to collect human-labeled data for our evaluation and clustering pipelines. In the process of designing its replacement.

https://www.amazon.com/oc/dash-buttonI was the founding backend services engineer on the project and have been responsible for overall system architecture, backend service architecture, coordination between different engineering teams and product management, creating team processes, scoping and tasking out work to team members, and helping product management prioritize investigation into new business models. I also implemented multiple backend services. I was the technical lead on the project.Previously, I worked on backend networking for Kindle devices, including integration with cellular carriers, data plan provisioning and maintenance, and the implementation of item tracking, purchase, and accounting systems for data plan purchases through Amazon.

I was lead/managing engineer for the Tax products in the Eagle division. Responsibilities included business level design decisions for the product, particularly designing our implementation of enhancement requests, managing the tax engineering team, implementation of some features, and working to manage framework code across multiple engineering teams. I was highly involved in our recruitment and interview processes, training of new developers, and our events committee.

Internship at India's most used job search website (and one of the 10 most used websites in the country). Responsible for design, construction, and some testing of features of the Resdex search engine. Most of my work has been on parallelizing the search infrastructure and optimizing, cleaning up, and adding features to parts of the code. I have worked very deeply with the Apache Lucene search API.