# Neil Jones > Skeptical AI Practitioner | ex-big tech | ex-corpo Location: San Jose, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/neiljones Having spent many years in the role of guiding the software engineering process, I seek roles where I can be an Individual Contributor on a team of engineers. I have decades of experience with C++, Java and Python on backend services large and small. I have started a formal education in learning ML techniques and statistical analysis that I expect to complete in 2026. ## Work Experience ### Principal Software Engineer @ Warner Bros. Discovery Jan 2023 – Present I help the teams that surface recommended content on Max: - guide collaboration across different orgs and continents - uplevel the engineering process: gradually introduce best-practices and rigor - communicate engineering realities to set realistic stakeholder expectations - project planning and sequencing; tactical decision making around launching and iterating - growing the leadership team ### Staff Software Engineer @ Google Jan 2016 – Jan 2023 | Mountain View, CA From October 2021 until March 2023, I worked in YouTube Trust and Safety. This role involved technical architecture, approach-setting, mentorship, and little bits of implementation and production support. From October 2020 until 2021, I worked in Google Search. My area involved gathering certain types of data from various web-scale databases, and summarizing it into a measure of world-wide web health. Mostly C++ and Flume (Google's version of Spark). From January 2016 until October 2020, I worked on YouTube TV, in API frontend development. Notable projects include: - Rewriting the entire API system in C++ from Python, in a team of 30, while: - decreasing per-query cost by 50% - increasing software maintainability - mentoring other engineers in the intricacies of legacy software migrations (they are tricky) - participating in hiring and other citizenship activities - Developed system cross-authentication: this is why you can log in to HBO Max using your YouTube TV account. - Developed and built the API for sports lenses: if you look on the watch page during a sports event, you will see stats, scores, key plays, and other useful information. This updates in real time, and won a technical Emmy, and makes baseball more interesting. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Netflix Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Los Gatos Responsibilities range from data modeling, business logic, distributed processing, and data compression to Pub/Sub messaging, system insights, and data diagnostics. ### Staff Software Engineer and Technical Lead @ Google Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 Designed and built the YouTube Kids application on Android, and worked in a team of 3-5 on the iOS application. I helped add several features our users asked for, such as the ability to block content, which makes me happy because delivering features to users is what this is all about. Also worked on client-facing APIs to match backend data providing to client consumption. ### Staff Software Engineer @ Google Jan 2012 – Jan 2014 | Google[x] I worked on the applications you see when you use Google Glass, specifically real time video calls. This was all Android app work, with JNI and some lower level work in addition to the app itself. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Google Jan 2010 – Jan 2012 I worked on several projects here at YouTube, centered around the delivery of real-time video to consumers. I helped build the platform that streamed the 2012 London Olympics, and Hangouts on Air. This was a combination of Java and Python, generally as RPC services. ### Software Engineer @ Google Jan 2007 – Jan 2010 I worked on Google Groups, a small (by Google standards) but stable mailing list product. Got it to work for enterprise customers, helped build legal discovery tools, etc. Did a lot of operational improvements on it so that it didn't require as many engineers to keep it running. Maintenance work in C++ and python, new features developed in Java. Successfully altered the system to go from paging our team 200 times per week to less than 5. ### Programmer Analyst III @ Center for Research in Biological Systems Jan 2007 – Jan 2007 Wrote a tool for parallelizing scientific applications. Finished my dissertation. Met cool people. Learned about MRI and medical imaging. Combination of Java, Perl, and Python. Note: this research center no longer exists, like many grant-based research projects. ### Graduate Student @ UCSD Jan 2001 – Jan 2007 Specializing in bioinformatics. Matlab, perl, R. ### Programmer Analyst III @ Biomedical Informatics Research Network Jan 2007 – Jan 2007 Worked on a tool for running many tasks in parallel on large clusters. ### Software Engineer @ Codexa Corporation Jan 2001 – Jan 2001 Designed a system for processing message board articles for financial signals, and then reselling those signals to institutional investors. It involved J2EE and message-driven beans before that was thing. Company had problems because message board articles tend to be posted by crazy people. All Java. On Sun hardware, even. ### Software Engineer @ New.net, Inc. Jan 2001 – Jan 2001 Let's be honest. Nobody but the employees remember this place. But, basically, they got it into their heads to create a DNS registrar that would handle top-level domains without the necessary standards-body approval, so you could buy "jones.family", and create a website for http://jones.family, but it could only be seen on the 20 or 30 computers that had some crazy browser plugin installed. Shortly after I left, that "browser plugin" started to do things like change your search engine, and is now widely considered to be spyware. ### "Senior" Server Engineer @ eMachines Jan 1999 – Jan 2000 Built a targeting popup ad server, an OOBE for Windows ME, an ad traffic system, and a bunch of other weird stuff. Emachines is still around in some form, but the division I worked for has long since evaporated. ### bottlewasher and haggler @ Free-PC/eMachines Jan 1999 – Jan 2000 Mostly worked on MySQL databases designed with huge schemas, rather than taking a normalized approach and letting MySQL do its thing. ### Portfolio Engineer @ First Quadrant Jan 1997 – Jan 1999 Perl, lots and lots of perl. ## Education ### Master of Science - MS in Machine Learning UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science ### PhD in Computer Science UC San Diego ### BS in Chemistry Caltech ### Certificate of Data Science and Machine Learning in Machine Learning MIT Institute for Data Science and Society ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/neil-jones-6021484 --- Source: https://flows.cv/neiljones JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/neiljones/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12