I joined Twitter almost 6 months ago, with a dual role: Director of Engineering for the Cortex Platform, leading 5 teams across the US, and NY Site Lead for over 116 engineers. After 2 years, Watson recruited me back as Director of Engineering, where I ran a global organization of over 100 engineers, both in Japan and the US. I also designed and launched what is now a Research-wide initiative ( AI Challenges), which brought researchers across all global labs together to solve specific research challenges, taking an MVP approach to maximize both impact and learnings. The best example of this was the Quantum Experience and Quiskit, which lead to the creation of a new business unit IBM Quantum. After a one year assignment to support and learn from Mike Rhodin (Watson SVP), I joined IBM Research as Director of Emerging Technologies, where I lead a team of engineers and designers to enable researchers and help turn good ideas into impactful experiences. A year in, I was asked to lead teams of designers and became Watson’s first Design Principal. At IBM, I became Engineering Manager of my team and was part of the Design Thinking Transformation form the beginning, where we trained product teams to adopt Design Thinking and went from about 60 designers in July 2013 to 1,600 today. I was leading the front-end team by the time Vivisimo got acquired by IBM. After a couple of years, I was speaking and facilitating workshops at Agile and Lean UX conferences, with a focus on bringing Agile and UX together.

There, I learned and practised User Research and User Experience (UX) as well as agile and lean from the trenches (ask me about Kanban!). In addition to doing NLP and research work, I also started becoming a more integral part of the engineering team. In 2007, after defending my PhD thesis (with a 7-month baby in my belly), I joined a startup as the only Computational Linguist. During the last years, being part of the grad committee was one of the greatest experiences, it allowed me to learn and grow my leadership skills. For the first couple of years, I actually spent more time in the computer cluster than doing my graduate work. While I had already done some programming as part of my undergrad (my senior thesis was titled: ”A bottom-up chart parser for PATR unification grammars in prolog”), it was at CMU where I really immersed myself with coding.

Having studied Translation and Interpreting (Catalan, English and German), I came to the US to do my masters in Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the Language Technologies Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Ari Font Llitjos What has been your journey in tech so far?

Ari tech software