William Chou

willREMOVE@chouCAPPED.fyiWORDS • github.com/dreamofabear

Experience

Square

Senior Staff Software Engineer

Oct 2022 — current

  • Tech lead of merchant catalog team & organizational leader for zero-to-one Cash App Shopping initiative
  • Designed merchant identity graph that linked Block's business units — Cash App, Afterpay & Square
  • Integrated LLMs into operations tooling to automate repetitive work (e.g. actioning customer escalations)
  • Led metadata platform work that enabled launches of 50+ engineers across banking, lending, search, etc.

Snap

Staff Software Engineer

Jan 2022 — Sep 2022

  • Returned to an IC role at Snap R&D's startup incubator, working on the future of virtual copresence
  • Filed a patent for innovations with 3D and avatars in virtual conferencing platform "ohyay"

Google

Staff Software Engineer

Feb 2020 — Jan 2022

  • Founder/TLM for three teams on zero-to-one web content initiatives — a top-four priority for Search
  • Launched Web Stories for WordPress, which drove 15% of Web Stories clicks on Google Discover

Staff Software Engineer

Sep 2016 — Feb 2020

  • TLM of three teams on AMP, an OSS web framework that powered XX% of Google mobile search
  • Designed new programming models which scaled AMP to verticals like e-commerce and travel
  • Engineering lead for cross-org integrations including Gmail and Google Assistant
  • Gave tech talks at Google I/O, AMP Conf, and developer conferences around the world

Senior Software Engineer

Nov 2013 — Sep 2016

  • Tech lead of Google Drive for iOS — led it to become the #2 productivity app on the App Store
  • Designed new UI framework shared across Google's productivity suite (Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides)
  • Led modernization of release processes e.g. time-based releases and slow feature rollouts

Zynga

Senior Software Engineer

April 2012 — Jun 2013

  • Worked at Zynga's experimental social gaming studio on innovations like The Friend Game
  • Full-stack engineer for #1 iOS games Draw Something 2 & What's the Phrase

Arkadium

Game Programmer

Sep 2010 — Apr 2012

Education

Cornell University

2005 — 2009

BA and MEng. in Computer Science

Activities

Big Brothers Big Sisters of NYC

2014 — 2020

Absolute Zero Breakdancing Club

2005 — present