Richard Kuo
338 Spear St., Unit 7D
San Francisco, CA 94105
Mobile: 281-224-8898 | E-mail: rkuo@rkuo.com | Website: rkuo.com
Current resume: rkuo.com/resume | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/richardykuo
Summary of Qualifications
- Highly motivated and accomplished entrepreneur, engineering manager and developer with 20+ years experience.
- Senior positions held at Google, YouTube, Netflix, and various startups.
- Extensive experience with online video, imaging, media workflows, and managing integration with strategic content partners.
- Excellent and unique combination of hard technical skills with awareness of business, managerial and leadership issues and the needs of end users.
- Experienced at managing and leading teams, building company culture, performing hands-on technical development, and designing common sense usability into products.
Experience
Founding Architect and Engineer
Imgix – San Francisco, CA – imgix.com
From Nov. 2014 to present
- Responsible for the core image/video processing and caching team at imgix that serves billions of images per day (Objective C, C++, Lua)
- Currently overseeing a large migration of rendering services into the cloud.
- Successfully executed a multi-year project to develop a GPU accelerated image rendering layer that is OS portable and compatible with the macOS CoreGraphics / CoreImage API.
- Did the core implementation to successfully migrate our stack from bespoke caching and load balancing to more standard/scalable industry solutions
- Designed an automated regression test suite for the imaging pipeline, including multiple image quality assessment metrics and tools for manual review (Python, C++)
- Fully re-architected the animated GIF processing pipeline, including support for lossy GIF compression.
- Developed encoding paths to MP4, WebM, WebP, APNG, AVIF, BPG, etc.
- Developed various smart cropping methods, including entropy, face detection based, etc.
- Re-architected and implemented the core pipeline into a streaming encoding architecture, improving time to first byte response.
- Designed and implemented a JSON based format for advanced real time image composition (Lua).
Chief Technology Officer
Triemt – San Francisco, CA – triemt.com
From Aug. 2012 to Dec. 2013
- Developed a toolset for managing YouTube metadata in bulk for large scale commercial partners. (Java)
- Consulting for various media companies on bridging the gap between old and new media.
- Prototyped an enterprise scale mass transcoding system leveraging Hadoop.
- Consulted with Fortune 500 company to evaluate and recommend SVOD vendors for a multi-million dollar bid.
- Advised energy industry startup on scalability and general engineering issues.
Senior Manager, Encoding Operations
Netflix – Los Gatos, CA – netflix.com
From Mar. 2011 to Jun. 2012
- Responsible for a team managing the digital deployment of $1.8B in yearly content spend for hundreds of thousands of streaming titles.
- Managed video engineers specifying new encoding recipes for ingest and playback (3D, 3DS, h.264, AAC, mezzanine formats, etc)
- Managed onboarding engineers responsible for engaging with delivery partners and integrating their delivery systems with Netflix.
- Managed video specialists monitoring and operationally managing the flow of content into Netflix.
- Managed quality control specialists ensuring the quality of content going live on the Netflix service.
- Managed the interaction with one of the largest Amazon EC2 deployments in the world (for our encoding cluster).
- Quantified ongoing health of partner deliveries by producing new metrics via the QC team and feeding them back to partners immediately.
- Greatly reduced the number of new catalog issues by adding additional manual process checks (duration, frame rate, telecine, duplication, etc.) and adding automated checks (audio channel power mappings).
- Greatly reduced the number of existing catalog issues by running various data consistency checks and working with team to perform ad hoc analysis and regeneration of problematic issue patterns.
- Recognized last minute catalog quality problems with Netflix’s LatAm expansion. Last minute QC effort by our team credited with saving the entire launch.
- QC team developed into a new and permanent part of Netflix that both defends the bulk of content on site and performs detailed checks of higher profile content.
- Executed major catalog revisions and deployment of new h.264 recipes, 3D and ProRes support.
- Overall, reduced on time metric concerns from “needs constant attention” to “it just works”. Drove huge improvements in both measuring existing catalog quality and then fixing those issues.
Partner Technology Manager (Platforms)
Google – Mountain View, CA – google.com
From Oct. 2009 to Mar. 2011
- Product manager for an internal team of engineers providing top tier oncall services for Google’s most strategic partners
- The team also managed large scale shifts in technology across multiple other teams at Google.
- Helped lead teams through a large scale security push over the course of a month and a half with minimal negative impact.
- Specified a system for measuring and predicting partner revenue (total scale in the billions) and using the data to alert on-call engineers in real time when problems are detected.
- Specified several approaches for reducing noise in our alerting systems and sending more relevant alerts to account managers.
Partner Technology Manager (YouTube)
Google/YouTube – Mountain View, CA – youtube.com
From Aug. 2006 to Sep. 2009
- Product managed the following: Google Video to YouTube migration; Requirements for integration with large content partners – (e.g. bulk delivery, web management, and reporting); General partner onboarding process for account managers. Our team grew YouTube partnerships from just four partners to several thousand in three years.
- Helped develop the initial format for bulk delivery via SFTP at YouTube.
- Product managed the migration of hundreds of existing Google Video partners and their content to YouTube channels.
- Developed the standard technical process for onboarding new YouTube content partners into YouTube systems.
- Oversaw the development of internal tools for bulk editing of YouTube partner settings.
- Managed the addition of multiple additional metadata fields to the YouTube partner metadata specification to accommodate new features and products at Google.
- Specified and drove adoption of HD formats with YouTube partners and reports to track HD adoption.
- Product managed the development of an online feed validator to assist partners in self service content delivery.
- Product managed the development of bulk management tools for partners to manage their own content.
- Product managed the specification and delivery of the initial set of collection society reports at YouTube to MCPS and as the basis for many other collection society reports.
- Specific focus on music label and publisher requirements in our content partnerships.
Co-Founder, Chief Technology Officer
SnapStream Media – Houston, TX – snapstream.com
From Apr. 2000 to Jul. 2006
- Architected all core components of Beyond TV, including advanced scheduling and dispatching with n-tuner support, guide data processing and retrieval, library services, a post processing system, integrated web server administration, and watchdog/agent processes. (C, C++, C#)
- Constantly gathered requirements for SnapStream’s product lines and built them into working features with a combination of agile development practices and common sense.
- Defined key hiring practices at the company (with credit to Joel on Software).
- Defined and developed the culture for key development processes, including coding style and philosophies, issue tracking, code reviews, source control, testing practices, estimation practices, beta program participation in releases, and more.
- Developed and productized the commercial detection analysis filters and algorithm used in Beyond TV.
- Highly experienced with DirectShow filters and porting codecs to the DirectShow architecture.
- Reverse engineered and reimplemented the MMS real time streaming protocol used in Windows Media Services for Beyond TV.
- Defined a client-server web service architecture in Beyond TV which allowed SnapStream to release Beyond TV Link, a LAN client for use with any Beyond TV server.
- Implemented classes to parse and rewrite MPEG-2 program streams.
- Implemented MPEG-2 transport stream demultiplexer with integrated PSIP parsing for timeshifted over the air high definition support.
- Led Beyond TV through several notable milestones, including Best of CES, being a showcase application at the Windows XP launch with Bill Gates, PC Magazine Editor’s Choice in mid-2004, PC Magazine’s DVR Software of the Year in 2004, and several excellent reviews the latest being a 4.5 / 5 review in CPU Magazine, April 2006.
- Beyond TV also forms the basis of the 24/7 enterprise mass TV recording and search solution used by the Daily Show, the Soup, Saturday Night Live, etc.
Consultant
Technical People, Inc. – Dallas, TX
From Aug. 1998 to Aug. 1999
- Worked in a team at Wal-Mart Corporate in Bentonville, Arkansas conducting a nationwide rollout of new routers to stores.
- Developed upgrade and deployment procedures for Associated Bank branch systems in Wisconsin and traveled with a team across the state executing the upgrades.
- Specifically requested by the clients in both cases to be the consultant responsible for wrapping up the projects.
Expertise
- Multiple image and video formats
- C, C++, Java, C#, and SQL/DB stacks on Amazon EC2.
- Running a team using agile development methodologies.
- iOS and macOS development in Xcode.
Awards
- Windows XP launch event showcase – SnapStream Personal Video Station
- PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice – 2004 – SnapStream Beyond TV
- Google OC Award – 2010 – Video Fingerprinting (YouTube)
- Netflix “Launch Hero” – 2012 – For the Latin America launch.
- Apple Product Security – CVE-ID CVE-2013-1024 – 2013 – Discovered a security flaw. Viewing a maliciously crafted movie file may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution.
Education
1998 – University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Business – Philadelphia, PA
- B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering
- B.S.E. in Entrepreneurial Management
1993 – St. John’s School – Houston, TX
References
References available upon request.
rkuo.com 