Richard Ekwall

Richard Ekwall Email and Phone Number

Software Engineer @ Benetics
Zurich, Switzerland
Richard Ekwall's Location
Zurich, Switzerland, Switzerland
Richard Ekwall's Contact Details

Richard Ekwall work email

Richard Ekwall personal email

n/a
About Richard Ekwall

Hi! I'm currently on a sabbatical, after spending close to 16 years at Google.At Google, I was a Senior Staff Engineering Manager, led teams of up to 40 engineers working on systems in the location, search, and mapping space and used by billions of users.My expertise spans innovative consumer product development, hands-on full-stack software engineering, search quality and data analysis. I excel at bridging technical depth with managerial finesse – nurturing individual contributors and managers – and a strong product sense to define the strategy and vision of the organization.On the tech side, I also have a long-time passion for AI and more recently for LLMs. On the personal side, I have a strong commitment to sustainability and addressing climate change.

Richard Ekwall's Current Company Details
Benetics

Benetics

View
Software Engineer
Zurich, Switzerland
Website:
benetics.io
Employees:
16
Richard Ekwall Work Experience Details
  • Benetics
    Software Engineer
    Benetics
    Zurich, Switzerland
  • Google
    Senior Staff Eng Manager - Current Location
    Google Nov 2022 - Mar 2024
    Zurich, Switzerland
    Leading engineering team working on Location for Search and for other products at Google.~35-person cross-functional team, focused on machine learning, search quality and full-stack development across Google's codebase. The team runs several millisecond-latency and million-qps services.Strong focus on clear and crisp internal communication, cross-team influence and stakeholder management, in an area under heavy regulatory scrutiny (GDPR, Digital Markets Act).
  • Google
    Senior Staff Eng Manager - Maps Timeline
    Google Sep 2019 - Oct 2023
    Led Maps Timeline engineering team at Google. Transparency and value around your Location History. ~20-person full-stack and cross-functional team.Defined 3-year strategy and vision for the team working with very sensitive data from large user base, in a complex privacy and regulatory environment. In 3 years, doubled the monthly usage of Timeline, an already mature product. Launched overhaul of technical infrastructure, as well as a few sustainability features.Coached individual contributors and managers on Google’s performance evaluation system, reaching 2000+ engineers and managers.
  • Google
    Senior Staff Eng Manager - Geocoding
    Google Nov 2016 - Sep 2019
    Leading Geocoding team at Google. Mapping search queries (e.g. addresses, cities, countries) to their location on Earth. ~30-person team.Built up full-stack team: search quality, metrics, frontend, on-device/offline geocoding, developer APIs. Hired key leaders for new investment areas on the teamInvested in integrating with KnowledgeGraph-based search backend. Successful 2-year project with strong quality gains and huge system simplification.Established collaborations with maps data teams and with the rest of local search quality at Google. Participated in defining new, scalable metric to capture state of maps quality in next-billion-user countries, where traditional methods (paid raters or golden query sets) cannot work.Areas of interest include: search quality, information retrieval, data quality, metrics, frontend development, address processing, on-device systems (Google Maps running on your phone), developer APIs.
  • Google
    Staff Software Engineer
    Google Nov 2013 - Oct 2016
    Tech Lead/Manager of Geocoding Search Quality: re-started and grew team answering queries for addresses (e.g. [1600 Pennsylvania Ave]) on google.com and maps.google.com.Improved 2% of maps queries every year, from completely broken to perfect (reduced search quality headroom by 10-20% per year).Accelerated move to Machine Learning for ranking/scoring of answers, resulting in huge quality improvements.Established metric for side-by-side comparisons and continuous tracking of maps search quality; used by 50+ software engineers as their main yearly optimization target; used in Google-wide web search launch process.Grew tech leads and managers on the sub-teams.
  • Google
    Senior Software Engineer
    Google Nov 2010 - Oct 2013
    Tech lead and manager of Geocoding Data Quality: parsing addresses from external partners (e.g. business listings) and on web pages.Scaled address understanding of partner feeds to 100M+ listings a day and reduced processing time of largest feeds by 60%. Improved address annotation recall on web pages by 5% and decreased CPU usage of the address annotator by 40% (savings: ~1000cpus)
  • Google
    Software Engineer
    Google May 2008 - Oct 2010
    Individual contributor and Tech Lead on Location Extraction Service (100+ kqps, running early in google.com and maps.google.com search flow).Designed and implemented hot-swapping of search index for emergency fixes. Designed and implemented direct in-memory loading of binary and index, which reduced deployment of new versions of the software from 20h to 45min.
  • Epfl
    Phd Student And Research Assistant
    Epfl May 2002 - Apr 2008
  • Ist Remune Project
    Developer
    Ist Remune Project May 2002 - Apr 2005
    Developed communication protocols for fault tolerant systems in SDL (Specification and Description Language). Integrated subsystems written in SDL and Java.

Richard Ekwall Education Details

Frequently Asked Questions about Richard Ekwall

What company does Richard Ekwall work for?

Richard Ekwall works for Benetics

What is Richard Ekwall's role at the current company?

Richard Ekwall's current role is Software Engineer.

What is Richard Ekwall's email address?

Richard Ekwall's email address is ri****@****tics.io

What schools did Richard Ekwall attend?

Richard Ekwall attended Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne, Carnegie Mellon University, Ecole Internationale De Genève, La Châtaigneraie.

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