Lewis Hemens / CV

Experience

Senior Staff Software Engineer / Engineering Manager - Google Cloud, Dataform

I have led the engineering team through an almost complete rebuild and relaunch of Dataform to GA on Google Cloud:

• Grew the engineering team from 4 to 15 engineers across London and Warsaw.
• Scaled the platform to support massive growth across multiple metrics, to now serving over XXK users daily, managing XXM+ workloads and processing XXPb's of data every month.
• Expanded usage of Dataform's APIs to support analytics and AI use cases across multiple products including BigQuery and Vertex AI.

Co-founder & CTO - Dataform

Dataform provided an open-source framework and managed SaaS platform for data teams to orchestrate complex SQL based data pipelines. I developed the framework and platform from scratch, raised money, closed first customers, grew the engineering team from 0 to 4. I wore many hats throughout:

• Technical through architectural design, coding, devops, security, platforms, databases, UI & component libraries, documentation.
• Organizational through initial team hiring, developing organizational structures, coding and development standards.
• Business through raising investment, sales & customer support, marketing, financing, accounting and legal.

Dataform was acquired by Google in 2020.

Engineering Manager - Google, AdSense

Led a team of ~ 10 engineers over 2 years developing streaming and batch data pipelines to help customers optimize ad revenue, bringing incremental value to the business of $XXM annually:

• Delivered highly tailored recommendations through large scale statistics and data analysis.
• Developed and launched of the first publisher focused A/B experimentation platform from scratch.
• Trained ML powered responsive ad placement algorithms on the back of launching response ad-units for which I was granted a patent.

Software Engineer - Google, AdSense

Cut my teeth and gained experience on a number projects/teams, with a focus on big data pipelines (Flume/Dataflow), and web development.

Computer Science MA - Cambridge

Skills

Engineering

I've designed, built, launched and maintained multiple globally distributed software systems from scratch. I am comfortable with a range of languages and have experience at all scales of development:

• Low-level e.g Networking, C++
• Web and UI product development e.g React, Angular
• Operational and devops best practices
• Large scale backend API and data architectures, e.g Spanner, Kubernetes, gRPC

Big data & analytics

• I have designed and deployed petabyte scale data processing systems in a variety of contexts with e.g Flume, Dataflow or SQL.
• I have extensive experience in data analysis and statistics, advising many companies on their analytics functions.
• I have developed and deployed recommendation an experimentation systems at scale.

AI/ML

• I've built an auto-grad GPU powered ML framework from scratch, in order to give myself a deeper understanding of DL frameworks like Jax and Tensorflow.
• I have some experience turning papers into code, and experimenting with various model architectures.
• I keep up to date with recent ML research, and focus my free time on learning more by reading, listening, and recently, writing.

Leadership

• I've grown engineering organizations from the ground up, establishing healthy engineering cultures, managing both up and down, in and out.
• I've led in a variety of environments, from early stage scrappy startups to OKR driven engineer/product led teams and also mature, top down enterprise organizations.
• I'm adaptable, generally lean towards pragmatism, and am outcome driven.