Ken Hironaka

Indeed.com - Senior Director of Engineering

Japan

About

I'm passionate about building scalable platforms that power critical high-performance AI / ML models and product experiences. As an engineer, I have experience in search ranking relevance models, user personalization, model driven metric optimizations, Hadoop & Spark based technologies big data processing, AWS, and SEM (search engine marketing). I also have experience as a C++ software engineer at low latency equities electronic trading systems. I have a Master's degree in Information & Communication Engineering from the University of Tokyo.

Experience

  • Indeed (Tokyo)
    • Senior Director Of Engineering - Feature, ML Platforms
      Oct 2024 - Present · 1 yr 9 mos

    • Director Of Engineering - Feature, ML Platforms
      Mar 2024 - Feb 2025 · 1 yr

      Leading a group responsible for Indeed's ML platforms, and Indeed's data & ML feature platform that powers ML models and non-ML product experiences across Indeed. The group spans US, and APAC.

    • Director Of Engineering - Search, Feature, ML Platform
      Jan 2022 - Mar 2024 · 2 yrs 3 mos

      Led a group responsible for Indeed's search backend, jobseeker profile and real-time personalization store, feature platform, and its ranking & matching ML platform. The group empowered ML matching teams across Indeed to better match jobseekers and jobs via real-time higher-quality data, and more sophisticated DNN models. The data platform powered production jobseeker and job experiences on Indeed. The team spanned US and Tokyo, 10+ teams, and 90+ talented engineers.

  • Goldman Sachs (Tokyo)
    • Vice President
      Jan 2015 - Apr 2015 · 4 mos

    • Analyst
      Apr 2009 - Dec 2014 · 5 yrs 9 mos

      Core Equities Trading Technology Order Management and Exchange Connectivity Started out as a solo member of the NY-based Equities core systems engineering team responsible for architecting systems and frameworks used for Client connectivity, order management, and exchange connectivity. Worked on things like enhancing application-embedded in-memory transactional databases and automated integration testing frameworks. Acted as liaison & consultant for Asia teams, and drove integration projects involving new system adoption.

  • Software Programmer at TU Ilmenau
    Jul 2007 - Sep 2007 · 3 mos

    Developed a P2P DHT simulator for research purposes