Jillian(1)
jilliankozyra.com
Name
Jillian Kozyra
Synopsis
jillian [--software-engineer] [--engineering-leader] [--cyclist] [--climber]
Description
I am a software engineer living and working in San Francisco. I enjoy building products that solve real-world problems with data. I grew up in NYC/NJ, went to grad school in Poland, then lived and worked in Ireland for 10 years before moving to SF.
--software-engineer
I've worked at a variety of companies from seed series startups to FAANGs. While I enjoy contributing anywhere in the stack, my deepest experience is in the backend. I've built many APIs and pipelines, lately with a focus on RAG to enable agentic LLMs.
I do not have a strong language preference and prefer to use the right tools for the problem at hand. I've worked in Ruby, Typescript, Node.js, Python, and Haskell, with frameworks including Flask, FastAPI, GraphQL, React, Ruby on Rails, Tailwind CSS, Next.js, Airflow, and Prefect, across GCP and AWS. I also love optimising Postgres performance.
I am always open to consulting projects. Feel free to reach out at jilliankozyra AT gmail.com
--engineering-leader
I like upskilling and professionalising engineering orgs, with an eye towards quality hiring, collaboration, code quality, documentation, and speed of iteration. I feel very strongly about small, stacked PRs.
I have led teams from 2-6 engineers and am comfortable designing hiring processes, building teams, developing roadmaps, and delivering feedback.
--cyclist
I enjoy racing, riding, and wrenching on bikes of all kinds, especially wheelbuilding and helping people build their dream bikes. I race for and help lead a Bay Area co-ed amateur team, Super Sprinkles. We emphasise increasing participation in racing for underrepresented groups.
--climber
I boulder 2-3 times a week (3-4 in the cycling offseason), usually at Dogpatch Boulders in San Francisco. My favourite NYC-area gym is Method in Newark, NJ. They have some of the best setting I've ever experienced (if you like more modern setting styles). I like to visit local gyms when I travel to check out the different syles of problems.
I am working towards projecting V9.
History
Poggio Labs, Staff Software Engineer, 2021 - Present
Member of founding engineering team
Hired and led platform engineering team
Designed and built platform to ingest data at scale and surface it in app
Built RAG pipeline to harvest and automatically summarise documents
Worked on ways to standardise prompt iteration for non-technical team members
Curative, Staff Software Engineer, 2021 - 2021
Member of founding engineering team
Built out lab + patient management apps to scale from 0 to 200k COVID tests/day
Scaled up vaccine portal in response to viral demand
Interfaced with cusomters to build and support data synchronisation
Built technical support eng team to handle complex customer success requests
Atrium LTS, Staff Software Engineer, 2019 - 2020
Developed document ingestion and classification pipeline for legal docs
Built out ETL pipelines to enable data-driven decisions for BI team
Rolled out Sorbet, static typechecking for Ruby, throughout legacy Rails codebase
Mentored junior engineers on backend skills
Facebook, Senior Software Engineer, 2017 - 2019
Worked on software to proactively flag platform abuse on Facebook and Instagram
Contributed to modern and legacy software used by content reviewers (SRT, CRT)
Led a team of 5 engineers
Devised and implemented strategies to reduce amount of manual content review
Upleveled engineering team by standardising practises such as RCA reviews
Was #1 Haskell contributor at Facebook for several quarters
Google, Data Scientist, 2014 - 2017
Devised and implemented strategies to prevent spam from appearing in search
Sole maintainer of codebase for webmasters to have search penalties revoked
Analysed large amounts of data to detect new spammy behaviours
Created processes/pipelines for team with emphasis on scale and automation
Led Python class at Google to teach non-engineers how to code
Stablerenters/RentSpecs, CTO/Co-founder, 2012 - 2018
Built app to rate landlords and rental properties in New York City
Used heuristics and publicly available datasets to generate rankings
Courant Institute (NYU), Researcher/Teaching Assistant, 2008 - 2011
Built app for linguistics department for analysing linguistic traits across languages
Aided students in CS (Java and Python) classes with homework and coursework
Uniwersytet JagielloĊ„ski, MA, Central & Eastern European Studies, 2010 - 2012
GPA: 4.8/5.0
Dissertation: 5.0/5.0
Topic:Coalition Politics in Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada from 2006-Present
NYU, BA, Computer Science & Russian, 2005 - 2010
Slavic Award for Excellence, for achievement in Slavic languages/literature
Dean's List, 2007-2010