George Kola

About George Kola

I love to design, implement, performance-profile and optimize systems. I have 18+ years of experience building high-performance scalable distributed systems and have in-depth knowledge of operating systems and network protocol stacks and hold a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin Madison. As CTO of Voxer, I have deep experience building real-time low-latency messaging systems used by tens of millions of users world-wide. I redesigned Voxer client/server API in 2013 leveraging SPDY/HTTP 2.0. It significantly lowered latency for real-time voice chats and image/text and video messages, reduced packet loss rate and improved the performance of mobile clients while conserving battery life. I design an efficient sync layer for mobile (iOS & Android) app.I have designed and implemented the Truveo back-end distributed video search infrastructure (700+ million video records) that in 2010 handled over 3.3 billion monthly queries with average uncached search query response time of < 40 ms (90th percentile < 100 ms).I have designed the semantic analysis engine at Expect Labs that understands what people are saying in real-time (average response time < 5 ms) and extracts and disambiguates entities and key phrases and is robust in the presence of speech-to-text errors.Specialties:• Programming LanguagesProficient: C, C++, Objective-C, Java, Bash scripting, AwkFamiliar: Python, Go, Swift, JavaScript, Ruby, PHP • Extensive experience with Hadoop, Hive, MySQL, Memcached, Redis, Riak, DTrace, OProfile• Well versed in multithreading, event-driven programming, non-blocking I/O, dispatch queues• Experience with profiling servers/applications using CPU performance counters• Knowledge of Linux kernel internals, network protocols implementation• Experience with performance-profiling and optimizing real-time iOS audio and VoIP code

Experience

1. Senior Staff Software Engineer

   Google

   Feb 2016 — Present · San Francisco, CA, US

   I am currently Uber TL in AI and infrastructure helping design and land world leading ML infrastructure.I took Google Chat from a prototype to a full fledged app and successfully launched it. I was the overall client-server TL designing over 80% of functionality. I also led the shared layer/sync and iOS teams with 20+ engineers. I also hired 15+ engineers to Google Chat team and optimized the onboarding to help engineers ramp up quicker. I created and led the weekly design reviews + mentoring session to improve design process and help junior engineers grow their skills. This reduced time to land a feature by 80% by avoiding design/implementation churn and improved engineering productivity and happiness. Prior to Chat, I led toolkit team where we provided common building blocks and backend as a service to super-charge app development and feature development. The key idea is that 80% of each app is common stuff and 20% is innovation and that we will let you innovate and provide common building blocks for the rest supercharging app development. The components we developed includes analytics, notification, login/authentication and are still used by multiple billion user Google apps.

Education

• University of Wisconsin-Madison

  PhD, Computer Science

  2003 — 2008

• College of Engineering, Guindy

  B.E., Computer Science

  1997 — 2001

• University of Wisconsin-Madison

  MS, Computer Science

  2001 — 2003

Skills

• Distributed Systems
• C
• C++
• Scalability
• Hadoop
• Mysql
• Bash
• Java
• Operating Systems
• Memcached
• Ruby
• Awk
• Objective-C
• Chef
• Multithreading
• Perl
• Dtrace
• Linux