# Phil Nova

> Staff Software Engineer at Instagram

Location: San Francisco, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/philnova

I am a software engineer at Google. My skills include: Nodejs, Python, JavaScript, BigQuery, Google Cloud, React, Java, AWS, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, git, and Go.

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer @ Meta
Jan 2024 – Present
TL on Reels infra, responsible for delivering fresh, relevant content to users at low latency. Reels is a topline company priority. Work closely with ML ranking and mobile teams to increase revenue and engagement and lower cost of compute. Make the whole system more responsive to changes in demand to spend resources with the best ROI.

### Staff Software Engineer @ Google
Jan 2023 – Jan 2024 | San Francisco, California, United States
TLM and founding engineer of BrightGraph ("Moneyball for ML"). We make Google's ML training and serving infrastructure more efficient with data insights. Provide business insights to high level customers (including VPs, SVPs and the Alphabet Board of Directors).

### Staff Software Engineer @ Google
Jan 2023 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco, California, United States
TL of Hana, a web platform for peer-to-peer learning. Set technical direction for a team of 15.

### Senior Software Engineer @ Google
Jan 2020 – Jan 2023
TLM of Grasshopper, a mobile and web coding education app. Supported team of 4 engineers to do their best work. Oversaw a 1-1.5y effort to rebuild Grasshopper using internal technology after it was moved from Area 120 to Core, and improve performance and scalability. Tech stack: Flutter, boq, Spanner, google3.

### Software Engineer @ Google
Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area
Grasshopper team

I helped scale Grasshopper to >1 million users, making it the biggest Area 120 project to date. The team then graduated from Area 120 (internal incubator) into the Research and Machine Intelligence org. Grasshopper is a free, mobile-first learn-to-code app and JavaScript IDE for Android and iOS. I am the primary owner of analytics, app stability, and mobile backend.

### Software Engineer @ Color Genomics
Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area
Full-stack engineer on the Core Product team, supporting our most critical customer-facing flows (purchasing, fulfillment, and results for our genetic test) and internal tools for our support and lab teams.

My projects included:
- Improving purchase conversion with a redesigned purchase flow
- Giving customers more insight into turnaround time with a dashboard and email updates tracking the status of their order
- Converting customer report generation from a manual process to a dynamic one, removing a major bottleneck and allowing us to scale to higher purchase volume

### Software Engineering Intern @ Clever Inc.
Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco Bay Area
I Implemented full-stack project encompassing caching business metrics to MongoDB using a golang worker, exposing data via a Swagger API, and visualizing data on an internal website via React and d3.


## Education
### Bachelor of Science (B.S.)
Stanford University

### Doctor of Philosophy - PhD in Neurobiology and Neurosciences
University of California, San Francisco


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/phil-nova
- Website: http://philnova.io
- Website: http://github.com/philnova

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Source: https://flows.cv/philnova
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/philnova/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-01