Paul Butler

New York City

Experience

    • Jamsocket

    • October 2021 – present
    • New York, NY
    • Co-founder

    Building server infrastructure for next-generation web apps.

    • Two Sigma

    • October 2016 – May 2021
    • New York, NY
    • Quantitative Analyst

    Responsibilities include testing quant strategy hypotheses and writing production model code. Built data pipelines and front-end tools for tracking the impact of ongoing events on markets. Developed curriculum and teach quarterly sessions of an engineering course about D3.js. Python, Java, Spark

    • Google

    • October 2014 – October 2016
    • New York, NY
    • Software Engineer

    Worked under Search, on a team responsible for computing weights on the knowledge graph. Contributed to maintenance of offline data pipelines for graph data, as well as implementing latency-sensitive ranking code that runs within the search request/response cycle. C++, Java

    • Chango

    • July 2013 – July 2014
    • Toronto, ON
    • Data Scientist

    Developed tools for detecting botnets and ad fraud hidden in real-time ad market data. Designed and implemented a model for uncovering dense clusters in terabytes of ad market data, based on the MinHash probabilistic data structure. Python, Scikit Learn

    • Bit Aesthetics

    • November 2012 – July 2013
    • Toronto, ON
    • Sole Proprietor

    Consulted on data projects under the name Bit Aesthetics, including for a major US TV network. Developed a system for detecting trending n-grams in streaming text data based on the Apriori algorithm. Python, MongoDB

    • Facebook

    • September 2010 – December 2010
    • Palo Alto, CA
    • Software Engineering Intern

    Contributed to internal data infrastructure projects as well as open-source projects in the Hadoop family. Built several self-initiated visualization projects, including “Visualizing Facebook Friends”, which appears in the IPO filing. Java, R, PHP

Education

    • Stanford University

    • September 2013 – March 2020
    • SCPD (off-campus)
    • MMDS Graduate Certificate (2013-2014), CS231 (CNNs; 2018), CS224n (NLP; 2020)
    • University of Waterloo

    • September 2007 – June 2012
    • Waterloo, ON
    • Bachelor of Mathematics. Exchange at University of Leeds.

Open Source

  1. Server and client library for sending Web Push (VAPID) notifications, with Keras and Jupyter integration. I host a public server instance which has relayed over five million messages on a shoestring budget.

  2. Chrome and Firefox extension for visualizing the tree structure of Twitter conversations, with thousands of active installs.

Recognition

  1. Won a $10k cash prize for creating an interactive HTML canvas visualization of Toronto transit schedule data.

  2. “Visualizing Facebook Friends” named a top data visualization of 2011.

Selected Work

  1. Harvard Business Review, July-August 2011 issue (pages 32 and 33). Visualization of Groupon revenue breakdown.

  2. Created a visualization of a sample of ten million friend pairs to construct a world map. Published by Facebook and featured by the BBC and The Economist.

Skills

  • Languages: Python, Rust, TypeScript
  • Libraries: Pandas, PyTorch, PySpark, nom (parsing)
  • Tools: Git, LaTeX, WebAssembly
  • Interests: sailing, travel, prediction markets, generative art (organizer of Plotter People NYC)