Resume of Chris Latko

Chris Latko
Software Architect

About

Chris graduated with highest honors from Indiana University with a double major in Business Economics and Japanese Language and Literature. In 1994, he developed his first Web site and has since acquired over 25 years experience in the technology sector. He has held a variety of positions at companies he started, Fortune 500 companies, and a multitude of startups both in the United States and Japan. He has earned two patents through his most recent work at Banjo to move their architecture to a JVM-based streaming framework.

Work Experience

June 2017 – June 2019
Platform Architect
Banjo instantly organizes the world’s social and digital signals by location, giving an unprecedented level of understanding of what’s happening anywhere in the world, in real time.
Highlights
  • Moved to Protobuf/gRPC and built CI/CD tools for four languages.
  • Architected next generation JVM-based streaming framework.
  • Created declarative tools for rapid signal onboarding, advanced search across multiple data stores, and signal introspection.
  • Added global spatial filters to severely cut down signal noise.
June 2016 – June 2017
Principal Engineer, Infrastructure
Paxata provides an Adaptive Information Platform that enables business analysts with an enterprise-grade, self-service data preparation system to support the on-demand and ad-hoc business data needs for analytics, operations and regulatory requirements.
Highlights
  • Scaled development processes with compiler caches and granular incremental builds.
  • Modularized SDK codebase, moving all repositories into a monolithic repository.
  • Automated dependency reporting on vulnerabilities and licensing constraints.
  • Created guidelines for development processes to scale more efficiently.
January 2014 – May 2016
Vice President Engineering
The Boxfish platform is an award winning, patented suite of text analytics and AI algorithms engineered to extract highly relevant, hidden audiences across platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Adwords, Twitter and YouTube.
Highlights
  • Back-end Java development for content discovery and advertising APIs.
  • Led several big data initiatives using Spring XD, Cassandra, Apache Spark, and Scalatra.
  • Architected microservice infrastructure using Spring, Consul, Feign, Docker, and others.
  • Ported discovery API from C# to Java, building a RESTful API platform for future projects.
  • Wrote MongoDB implementation of Spring Security OAuth.
  • Built self-documenting API via a forked Swagger with custom annotations.
  • Integrated acquired company's search technologies in Ireland.

Awards

  • June 2019

    USPTO

    Patent: 10,324,948

    Normalizing Ingested Signals: The present invention extends to methods, systems, and computer program products for normalizing ingested signals. In general, signal ingestion modules ingest different types of raw structured and/or raw unstructured signals on an ongoing basis. The signal ingestion modules normalize raw signals into normalized signals having a Time, Location, Context (or "TLC") dimensions. A Time (T) dimension can be a time of origin or alternatively "event time" of a signal. A Location (L) dimension can be anywhere across a geographic area, such as, a country (e.g., the United States), a State, a defined area, an impacted area, an area defined by a geo cell, an address, etc. A Context (C) dimension indicates circumstances surrounding formation/origination of a raw signal in terms that facilitate understanding and assessment of the raw signal. The Context (C) dimension of a raw signal can be derived from express as well as inferred signal features of the raw signal.

  • April 2019

    USPTO

    Patent: 10,257,058

    Ingesting Streaming Signals: The present invention extends to methods, systems, and computer program products for ingesting streaming signals. Signal ingestion modules sample a plurality of frames contained in a raw streaming signal. The signal ingestion modules separate the raw streaming signal into a plurality of segments. It is determined that content in the plurality of sampled frames indicates a possible event type. The signal ingestion modules replay a segment, from among the plurality of segments, in response to determining the indicated possible event. The content of the segment is inspected during replay of the segment. The possible event type is confirmed or not confirmed as an actual event type based on the inspection. When confirmed, a context dimension of the streaming signal is updated to include the event type.

Contact

Education

  • 1995 1998

    Indiana University Bloomington

    Bachelors

    Business Economics

  • 1995 1998

    Tokyo International University

    Certificate

    Japanese Language

Skills

Backend Master
Java Go
Backend Senior
Javascript
Devops Senior
Docker Kubernetes

References

I've been fortunate enough to work with Chris for just about two years now. From our first conversations, it was clear that he has a wealth of experience as an architect of large scale data platforms. He has both breadth and depth of knowledge in backend development tools and techniques, libraries, frameworks, data stores, messages busses, build tools, and engineering processes, to name just a few.

I worked with Chris on some pretty complex problems, and I'd like to mention a few things about him for those who are interested. For one, he's a fantastic listener. I want to mention that first, because it's a skill that I think is critical to success in solving complex problems, and also often overlooked. Chris is also a creative thinker who's not afraid to try out a new approach or think about something from a different perspective. He's very thoughtful, and when he tells you something you can be sure that he's really thought about it first. If you have some difficult problems to solve, then I'd recommend Chris to help you with them.

I worked with Chris for over 2 years and he is in my opinion an immensely talented engineer and architect. Chris has the a vast experience in all things CS as well as the ability to very quickly pick-up new technologies and put them to work. All these invaluable skills paired with his dedication make him incredibly easy to recommend to companies big and small.