# Rob Ennals > Principal Engineer at New_ Public. Ex Facebook, Quora, Google Location: Mountain View, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/robennals ## Work Experience ### Principal Engineer, Public Service Incubator @ New_ Public Jan 2023 – Present New Public is a Non Profit founded by Eli Pariser (The Filter Bubble, MoveOn) focussed on building healthier online spaces. Public Service Incubator (PSI) is a partnership with an international consortium of public broadcasters to build a publicly governed online social platform the serves the public good and fosters understanding across divides. * Was the founding engineer of PSI and built much of the platform * Designed and implemented a modular platform that lets partners experiment with new features safely while keeping the core maintainable. * Mentored 16 partner developers so they could successfully extend the product independently. * Recruited 3 engineers to grow New Public's team * Helped run live pilots with thousands of participants across multiple countries. ### Co-Founder and CTO @ Talkful, Inc Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | Sunnyvale, California, United States After Covid eased, I returned full-time with two co-founders to pursue pro-social online spaces. * Built a new new pro-social online platform and multiple variants (React Native, Node.js, Firebase) across mobile and web * Ran live pilots with hundred of participants, including a partnership with the Forward Party * Bootstrapped by design - we did not seek venture funding to preserve mission alignment ### Career Break: Covid Parent @ Talkful, Inc Jan 2020 – Jan 2022 | Sunnyvale, California, United States Full time parent during COVID school closures (homeschooling and childcare). ### Founder @ Talkful, Inc Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | Sunnyvale, California, United States Incubated pro-social alternatives to mainstream social products. Led product, design, and research. * Built and tested 20+ prototypes (React Native, Node.js, Firebase) across mobile & web. * Recruited 500+ people for pilots, ran interviews and usability studies to refine the thesis * Partnered with Braver Angels and other groups to run real world pilots * Developed a reusable platform that become the foundation for New Public's Public Service Incubator ### Product Manager @ Facebook Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | Menlo Park, California I joined Facebook in the aftermath of the 2016 election to help them work out how to deal with misinformation and polarization. * Recruited by notable early employee Kang-Xing (KX) Jin, who had seen my Dispute Finder work at Intel Research * Defined a new metric for misinformation prevalence that avoided concerns of being "an arbiter of truth" by thinking instead about whether content was broadly trusted. * Led diagnostics on how low-quality/violative content enters people’s feeds (reshares, recommendations, groups, comments) to enable upstream prevention rather than relying solely on after-the-fact moderation. * Shipped ranking and product changes that closed multiple pathways by which bad content reached feeds. * Designed a new site-quality measure that reduced the reach of low quality "made for facebook" content. * Contributed to rater guidelines and labeling taxonomies for misleading/polarizing/low-quality content * Reworked comment ranking to reduce prevalence of toxic-but-engaging content and added new UI controls to allow filtering of borderline content ### Product Manager @ Quora Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | Mountain View, CA Quora aims to deliver the best answers to the questions people care about. When I joined, Quora was well regarded and was growing rapidly, but that growth was putting pressure on the content quality that was Quora's main differentiator. I led a company-level shift towards trustworthy high-status content that created long term value. Highlights: * Secured executive buy-in for a quality-driven strategy and authored the core documents that guided this * Helped launch "Sessions", (AMA-style Q&A) to attract high-profile contributors (e.g. Hillary Clintor and Paul Krugman) who wouldn't otherwise be on the platform. * Helped launch "Credentials", a revamp of author bios, to foreground expertise and increase perceived credibility * Helped launch "Knowledge Prizes", to spotlight particularly important questions and encourage high status writers to answer them. * Co-write press releases for multiple launches, to help land the points we wanted to make * Rolled out a new lightweight planning process that aligned projects with strategic outcomes while giving them clear scope to execute autonomously. ### Product Manager @ Google Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 | Mountain View, California I transitioned from Software Engineer to Product Manager (while still coding occasionally) and was responsible for "Featured Snippets" - search feature that answers a questions with a quote from a web page. * Drove major impact: by the time I left, Featured Snippets powered 60% of Google's direct answers. * Addressed legal concerns about publishers being unhappy being quoted by interviewing high quality publishers to confirm they were okay being quoted, and tuning algorithms to maximize the number of answers from sources happy to be quoted. * Trusted to lead product on what was Google's #1 hiring priority at the time * Helped design the eval strategy to track how well we were answering questions. * Helped design key elements of the product, including the answer UI and related questions feature. * Partnered with legal to draft legal policies and with our webmaster team to write webmaster docs. * Partnered with the language model research team that went on to create the create the transformer architecture Other projects included: * Launched the credibility panel that shows information about the source of a web result * Assisted with Google PageSpeed and early versions of AMP * Managed two other Product Managers ### Senior Software Engineer, Google Search @ Google Jan 2010 – Jan 2013 | Mountain View, California, USA * Implemented the first version of Authorship in Search - a key part of Google's strategy for connecting Search to Google+ and making the web more trustworthy. * Designed and implemented "Google Wallet for Web Content" - a collaboration with the Google Wallet team exploring a shift from ad-based monetization (which creates bad incentives) towards a model where people paid for higher quality, more trustworthy content. * Co-built an experimental search feature that flagged search results whose content was disputed by other sources. * Provided technical leadership by managing another engineer and mentoring an intern. ### Represented Intel in the HTML5 and WebApps Working Groups @ W3C Jan 2009 – Jan 2010 HTML5 was a critical transformation of the web platform, taking it from primarily a documentation format to a platform for rich applications. As Intel's representative in the HTML5 and WebApps working groups, my goal was to help the group reach agreement as quickly as possible, so developers could start building rich web apps that would drive demand for more powerful processors. Key contributions: * Helped resolve "Issue 42", a long-running disagreement about how extensible HTML5 should be, by drafting multiple proposals and helping reframe the debate. * Acted as a neutral mediator between the browser vendors and other parties, building consensus that helped the standard move forward. ### Staff Research Scientist @ Intel Research Jan 2004 – Jan 2010 | Berkeley, CA and Cambridge, UK The Intel Research Lablets were small university-based research labs, designed to foster close collaboration between Intel and leading academic computer science departments. I began at Cambridge lab and moved to the Berkeley lab in 2006. - Represented Intel at the W3C, in the HTML5 and WebApps working groups. - Led the Dispute Finder project, one of the first explorations of online misinformation. Media coverage from BBC TV, NPR, Canadian CBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, New Scientist, and others. - Created MashMaker, which let websites be combined in a spreadsheet-like way, treading forms as functions and pages as data sets. Media coverage from TechCrunch, Slashdot, MIT Tech News, The Guardian, and many others. - Engineered the fastest implementation of Software Transactional Memory. - Developed and co-developed multiple programming languages, compilers and programming tools. ### Journalist @ EXE Magazine Jan 1998 – Jan 1999 | UK .EXE was, at the time, the UK’s most widely read print publication for professional software developers (before the web killed the space). * I authored six feature articles, including two cover stories ### Software Engineering Intern @ The Santa Cruz Operation Jan 1998 – Jan 1999 SCO was, at the time, the leading enterprise Unix on x86 servers (before Linux dominance). I spent two summers working as a Unix kernel developer. Work included: * Porting parts of IBM's AIX networking stack to SCO UnixWare (as part of Project Monterey) * Building a kernel parallel performance profiler * Optimizing the networking stack to improve SPECweb benchmark results * Finding and fixing POSIX compliance issues This was before SCO's 2001 acquisition by Caldera and it's controversial legal strategy. One of my contributions (my port of the Berkeley Packet Filter) was later referenced in lawsuits against Linux - though the contested code was originally BSD code. ## Education ### PhD in Computer Science University of Cambridge ### BA in Computer Science University of Cambridge ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/robennals - Portfolio: http://robennals.org --- Source: https://flows.cv/robennals JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/robennals/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12