Software Engineer
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. 7 years of leadership and management experience, with influence across many Google product teams.

Seeking a role as an individual contributor tasked with reducing complexity and improving performance and reliability.

Google • Cambridge, MA • 2010–2026

11/2025–6/2026 • Photos Monetization Backend

Manager for a backend team responsible for showing the right promotions to the right people at the right cadence.

5/2024–11/2025 • Looker Studio

Staff SWE. Have done rotations on both the frontend and backend teams. Have focused mostly on testability, quality, and other productivity-oriented tracks of development. Created the first integration tests for the backend in its > 10-year lifespan.

11/2023–5/2024 • Privacy Sandbox

Engineering manager for the Anti-Abuse/Anti-Fraud team of Privacy Sandbox.

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