Jason Merkoski's Email Addresses & Phone Numbers

Senior Software Engineer @ Motorola From April 1996 to October 2000 (4 years 7 months) Technical Director @ BroadVision Build end to end ecommerce an payment solutions for the likes of Wal*Mart, Home Depot, Circuit City, Bank of America, Fleet Bank Boston, and others. From October 2000 to July 2005 (4 years 10 months) Principal Technical Program...

Senior Software Engineer @ Motorola From April 1996 to October 2000 (4 years 7 months) Technical Director @ BroadVision Build end to end ecommerce an payment solutions for the likes of Wal*Mart, Home Depot, Circuit City, Bank of America, Fleet Bank Boston, and others. From October 2000 to July 2005 (4 years 10 months) Principal Technical Program Manager @ Amazon Managed the rollout of the Amazon Appstore, with emphasis on the FireTV's role in the Appstore ecosystem. Worked closely with Lab126 in Cupertino, corporate teams in Seattle, to balance the need to integrate top-down Amazon features into the Appstore, and build bottom-up product features for the Appstore. My previous 5 years of experience at Amazon and at building team rapport helped considerably!Worked with internal and external video game studios, and app development shops. Frequent travel to Seattle, Cupertino, and Orange Country to manage deliverables for Fire TV. Consensus-building and evangelism from within the company to drive product releases for our customers. From July 2013 to June 2014 (1 year) Irvine, CAChief Technology Officer @ Bento Box Interactive Managed videogame and app development for multiple media properties, including an app that was in the top 5 on the Apple App Store for months. Managed teams of teams with locations in US, Romania, UK. Responsible for hiring and managing 20+ person team in US. Responsible for establishing software roadmap, infrastructure, and product vision.Worked with Apple and Facebook on partnerships for high-visibility clients, like Alicia Keys.Skills: Android, Unity, iOS, Big Data, Streaming Data, C++, S3, NoSQL, Patents, Product Management, Metrics, Agile, Scum, Java, Python, Partnerships, Mobile, SQL, Data Warehouse, Partnerships, Excel, PowerPoint From November 2011 to December 2012 (1 year 2 months) Venice, CaliforniaPrincipal Product Manager @ Amazon.com I started my time at Kindle as employee #10 on the team, and participated in all stages of creating the ebook revolution, from content, to software, to hardware, to embedded software, and beyond.I product managed the Kindle content feature set, the Kindle ebook file formats, the Kindle publishing tools, and Kindle content ingestion portals for publishers to use in submitting content. There were no Kindle books in the Amazon catalog when I first joined; during my time at Kindle I helped managed the growth of this collection to 1.2 million ebooks. I managed radical improvements to the format which helped Kindle out-compete Apple and others in the ebook space. And, of course, I was fantastically obsessed with customer metrics to manage the success of my products.I used large Amazon customer data sets to create business models, new product initiatives, and pricing models.I invented the Kindle Edition with Audio and Video format. I worked with publishers large and small to shape the digital reading experience. This was my favorite role of all on Kindle, as I got to be a "applied futurist" as opposed to an "armchair futurist". I got to create ideas, and see many of them through to real-world launch by working with internal teams Amazon, Audible, Lab126, and some of the world's largest publishers. From June 2008 to December 2010 (2 years 7 months) Greater Seattle AreaResearch and Development Manager @ Amazon.com I was Engineering Manager for software development teams in US and India, for an innovative ebook format, which at the time was Amazon's largest R&D effort. It involved research and development in computer vision, image segmentation, probabilistic modeling using Hidden Markov Models, integration (and contribution to) multiple open source software packages, and patents related to the (successful) outcome of this R&D effort.I managed a team which built and designed a fleet of over 1,000 servers to run a data science pipeline to process terabytes of data per day, transforming high-resolution 300dpi scans of physical book pages into Kindle ebooks The pipeline involved multiple machine learning and data science steps for image segmentation, text segmentation, paragraph and word segmentation, text style clustering based on HMM algorithms built in C++, the use of R for creating nearest-centroid classifiers for image thresholding, and the core data engineering framework (using custom internal Amazon toolchains) for managing the state of the pipeline, throughput and cost metrics, error tracking, QA of content, and more. Skills: Cloud Hosting, Big Data, S3, NoSQL, Ruby, R, Patents, Product Management, Metrics, Agile, Scum, Java, Python, Numpy, Streaming Data, SVMs, Kmeans Clustering, Textual Segmentation, Supervised and Unsupervised Machine Learning, C++, Perl, Image Segmentation, Text Detection, OCR, Gaussian Mixture Models, PDF, Firmware, Hardware, Performance Tuning From July 2007 to June 2009 (2 years) Greater Seattle AreaSenior Program Manager @ Amazon.com As Senior Program Manager, I launched Kindle1 in Nov 2007. I launched Kindle2 in Feb 2009, and KindleDX shortly afterwards. I was responsible for end-to-end oversight all aspects of new product launch including software, hardware, marketing, publicity, ebook content, tax, sales, order processing, publisher relations, etc. This was a very high visibility role as I represented Kindle to multiple business units, and executives. I frequently attended executive reviews with SVPs and Jeff Bezos on the progress of the Kindle.The Kindle was originally a mobile-only device using eInk, and I managed a large number of mobile-related initiatives, such as PRL (PReferred Roaming List) capabilities, data services management, and syncing of content using background mobile data networks from AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon.Skills: Program Management, Product Management, Metrics, Agile, Scum, Partnerships, Legal, Tax Nexus, Hardware, Firmware, Cloud Software, Mobile From June 2006 to June 2008 (2 years 1 month) San Francisco Bay AreaChief Technology Officer @ AdWallet AdWallet is a disruptive new digital media network that enables consumers to finally become direct participants in the high-stakes value exchange for their verified attention to a brand, service or ... actually anything. AdWallet believes in transparency about user data, and paying users to opt-in for relevant ads or lead-sharing experiences. #deletefacebookI managed the end to end technology and product systems, which included legacy C# apps running on AWS ElasticBeanstalk, Big Data ETL pipelines in python and Spark, terabytes of data from pixel tracking collectors, Twilio integrations for 100K+ SMS messages per day, Android, iOS, Firebase, customer.io, reporting and BI tools, video transcoding pipelines, and DevOps processes using the AWS stack and docker. My engineering team is US-based and international, with team members in the US, Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia, Uruguay, and Argentina. I participated in multiple fund-raising events, and scaled the infrastructure from supporting 50K+ users to 5M+ concurrent registered users. Santa Fe, New Mexico AreaChief Technology Officer @ TapInfluence Through the application of science and data, our proprietary marketplace provides an efficient way for brands and influencers to scale the creation, management and measurement of online influencer marketing programs and deliver consumers the type of meaningful and relevant content they desire. I hired and led a team of 30+ US-based product managers, UX designers, full-stack engineers, data engineers, and data scientists to create agile customer-facing products and insights.Notable among my accomplishments were transitioning the legacy app from Ruby on Rails to Node.js and React; transitioning from no big data systems to one which processed terabytes of data per day using Hive, Hadoop, and Spark; and building a large data science team to create business-focused predictive models (and products) for end-users with flask, keras, gensim, and scikit-learn, plus some proprietary hand-rolled algorithms.Successfully participated in multiple fund-raising and partnership events, and successfully sold the company to Izea in 2018 for $7M. From August 2016 to February 2019 (2 years 7 months) Mountain View, CACTO and Co-Founder @ Be Forever Me Founder and lead technologist for an innovative cloud-based B2C software solution for personal memory storage, search, and retrieval. We process audio and video recordings to extract features, like mood, text of spoken content, object detection, and make it all searchable.As founder and CTO, I created multiple AI and machine learning algorithms and patented them. Raised funding from seed investors, Bay Area VCs. Primary system components included iOS/ObjectiveC for the iOS app, Java for the Android app, ObjectiveC for the MacOSX app, Windows C++ for the Windows8 and Windows 10 apps, and a large backend infrastructure using keras, kaldi, sox, docker, gensim, tensorflow, and deep algorithmic mastery of audio and video signal processing and codecs. I used a variety of open-source applications on Github for components of the audio-video processing pipeline, but also experimented upon and built my own proprietary components, primarily for items such as speaker diarization, speaker recognition, and mood detection from audio samples. From May 2014 to July 2016 (2 years 3 months) Santa Fe, New Mexico AreaHead of Product @ Intel Corporation Fashion + Technology. I managed the product roadmap for Intel's wearable technology initiatives in the wrist-worn space. Worked with Intel chip teams on new device rollouts, IoT integrations.Worked with Apple and Google on device API integration. Managed a portfolio of algorithms (neural net, AI, deep learning) which used biometric data to predict health outcomes. Worked with internal sales, marketing, and product teams at Intel to derive business insights and new product directions.Worked with Intel and external business units on feature set roadmap planning, chip development, and wearable device feature specifications for the "Basis" band v2.Managed a team of ten, including managers-of-managers. From December 2014 to July 2015 (8 months) San Francisco Bay Area