Senior Software Engineer
& Engineering Manager
Jonathan Feinberg

Summary

Over 20 years of experience as a generalist software engineer, with long tenures at Google and IBM Research. Fluent in C++, Go, Java, JavaScript, Python, Objective C. Comfortable on the server, in the browser, and on-device. 5 years of leadership and management experience, with influence across many Google product teams.

Seeking a role as an engineering manager devoted to the well-being and diversity of a software team, an engineering lead for the design and execution of complex systems across platforms and organizations, or an individual contributor tasked with reducing complexity and improving performance and reliability.

Google • Cambridge, MA • 2010–2023

2022–2023 • Stat!

SWE for the Stat! team, which aimed to make scheduling better and easier for nurses in hospitals, using optimization. As members of a small team, we all did everything: backends to serve our API; endpoints to expose the backends to the web; prototype frontends using Google Sheets and Apps Script; translating hospital domain information into the mathematical language of optimization, etc.

2013–2022 • Ink

Founding member, then lead, then tech lead & manager of a team that brought low-latency freehand inking (the ability to draw beautiful vector graphics with your finger or a stylus) to Google products including Classroom, Chrome, Keep, and Photos.

My significant contributions:
  • Tech-led and managed a team of 7 full-time engineers.
  • As an individual contributor, designed and implemented PDF annotation in the Ink engine, which was launched as a ChromeOS feature.
  • Launched Google Canvas, an art-focused web app.
  • Launched Ink in Android Google Photos.
  • Launched drawing-on-video for Duo.
  • Mentored 2 STEP interns, both of whom converted to full-time Google SWEs.
  • Wrote and recorded the Ink Team jingle.
2010–2013 • Big Picture

Founding SWE member of the Big Picture data visualization research group, focused on public-facing projects to expose large data sets to large audiences.

I made significant contributions to:

  • The Google dictionary onebox, which supplements definitions with deep information on usage and context. Example.
  • The Google Books Ngram Viewer, which displays a graph showing how phrases have occurred in a corpus of books over time.
  • YouTube Trendsmap, a visualization of the most shared and viewed videos in various regions across the United States over the last 12-24 hours.
  • Google+ Ripples, a visualization of public sharing activity in Google+.
  • YouTube Storyboards, which brought stylized "comic strip" embed images to YouTube. The comic strips were automatically generated using video frames, scene analysis, and available metadata for a video.
  • g3Explorer, which presents a navigable treemap of any engineer's contributions to the monolithic Google source repository. Very handy for performance review.
2010–2015 • Memegen

Co-founder and lead of Google's internal meme generator, Memegen. I wrote the rendering backend, and created such features as Memegeist, voting, and a live-preview meme editor.

2010 • Google Books

Designed and led the implementation of the mobile store for Google eBooks.

IBM Research • Cambridge, MA • 2003–2010

Collaborative User Experience • Cambridge, MA • 2003–2010

My group, Collaborative User Experience, provided IBM with research into the social and technical underpinnings of successful and inclusive business collaboration. After 5 years with the Social Computing group, I moved to the Visual Communication Lab.

Senior Software Engineer, 2006–2010
Advisory Software Engineer, 2003–2006
  • Designed and built the dogear social bookmarking application. Dogear's design determined the design of the entire Lotus Connections suite. I received an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award for dogear. I created the “wordle” word-cloud layout algorithm at this time; see below for more details.
  • Designed and built the Cattail file-sharing system, which, after three years as a lab-hosted project (and hundreds of thousands of files), became a CIO-supported application.

Other Work of Interest

Wordle.net • 2008–2020
Wordle Thumbnail

I created the wordle word-cloud layout algorithms while working on a social bookmarking application at IBM Research, in 2005. I created the “Wordle” web application in 2008.

Beautiful Visualization
I contributed a chapter about Wordle to the O'Reilly book "Beautiful Visualization".
Engineering for Works of Art

I have helped several artists to realize works in traditional media, in museum installations, in concerts, and on computer screens.

  • noplace (2008)
    Marek Walczak & Martin Wattenberg with Jonathan Feinberg

    Image processing, on-demand video generation, storage and messaging architecture.

  • The Dumpster (2005)
    Golan Levin with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg

    Data wrangler.

  • The Secret Lives of Numbers (2002)
    Golan Levin et al.

    Data wrangling and web app.

  • The Alphabet Synthesis Machine (2002)
    Golan Levin with Jonathan Feinberg and Cassidy Curtis

    glyph Web app, font generation and delivery, system architecture and administration.

  • The Apartment (2001)
    Marek Walczak & Martin Wattenberg with Jonathan Feinberg

    Image and sound processing, generation of 3D walkthroughs, installation technical design and administration.

Papers and other publications

Education

1989, Brown University, Providence, RI: BA English and American Literature