Takuya Kitazawa
- 10+ years of experience at start-up, Big Tech, and as an independent, with a master's degree in Information Science and Technology specializing in recommender systems and scalable machine learning.
- On a mission to strengthen our lives in the information-rich world, which has led my career into full-stack application development, data science & analytics, machine learning productization & operationalization, and product management.
- Empathy as a core value, allowing me to serve different scales and verticals of B2C/B2B business across the globe (e.g., e-commerce, gaming, online media, supply chain), contribute to open-source and research communities, and mentor fellow developers.
Work
2023/08 – Present
Information and Communication Technology Advisor
Mzuzu Entrepreneur Hub, Mzuzu, Malawi
C# .NET Digital MarketingAs a Canadian international volunteer from World University Service of Canada, I promote equitable access to ICT in Malawi, a small landlocked country in southeast Africa, through digital skills training for young people and capacity building at the local social enterprise.
2022/09 – Present
Freelance Software Developer
Self-employed in British Columbia, Canada
Python Google Cloud Apache Beam Data Engineering Natural Language ProcessingHelping individuals and businesses (mostly small-scale, up to 150 people) to efficiently, effectively, and ethically productize data as an analytics pipeline, ML/NLP model, and customer-facing applications. Provided services include but are not limited to:
- Full-stack software engineering
- Data science, analytics, and machine learning consultation
- Product management and development
- Mentoring, teaching, and writing
2021/08 – 2022/08
Software Development Engineer - Personalization
Amazon, Vancouver, BC, Canada
TypeScript Scala Python AWS Apache Spark Apache Airflow Recommender SystemsWorked full-stack on Amazon's "Buy Again" repeat purchase recommender system, including its frontend components and backend data pipelines.
2020/10 – 2021/08
Senior Product Manager
2021/02 – 2021/08
Treasure Data (Canada), Vancouver, BC, Canada
2020/10 – 2021/02
Treasure Data, Tokyo, Japan
Python Data Visualization Predictive Modeling Digital Marketing Product Management
- Served a product management role in the digital marketing, data analytics, and machine learning domain. Product features I was in charge of include: out-of-the-box data visualization, A/B testing, and predictive customer scoring.
- Productized solution templates in an in-house Treasure Boxes ecosystem to accelerate advanced, strategic use of rich customer data. I have also worked closely with the business development team to collaborate with the partners and develop the platform together.
2020/02 – 2020/09
Product Manager
2019/04 – 2020/01
Staff Engineer
2018/08 – 2019/03
Senior Engineer
Arm, Tokyo, Japan
(Spin-off Treasure Data as an independent organization)
As an engineer:
- Evangelized the connection of big data, machine learning, data science, and IoT, both for company's internal and external audiences.
- Worked closely with an internal sales engineering team and served as a data science consultant to accomplish clients' machine learning projects in a wide variety of industries, including retail, gaming, and online media.
- Represented individual contributors in Arm's data business unit, and mapped out granular IoT-data integrated use cases and solution ideas through prototyping and customer-facing work with global teams.
- Led the development of a brand-new Python SDK for an enterprise big data analytics platform, and renovated the surrounding data science ecosystem.
As a product manager:
- Worked with multi-regional cross-functional teams, and continuously delivered marketer-facing features in an enterprise customer data management platform by bridging the communications among internal/external and technical/non-technical stakeholders.
- I was particularly responsible for product development and strategy establishment in the applied machine learning and customer data analytics domain, and we have successfully recognized as "Strong Performer" in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Analytics Technologies, Q3 2020.
- Led a collaborative project with Arm Research, an Arm's internal research-oriented group, and published a novel solution template for data-driven multi-touch attribution.
2017/02 – 2018/07
Data Science Engineer
Treasure Data, Tokyo, Japan
(Acquired by Arm)
Java Apache Hive Apache Spark Ruby on Rails
- Regularly contributed to the development of Apache Hivemall, a scalable machine learning library running on Apache Hive and Spark.
- Led the development of out-of-the-box machine learning applications from competitor analysis and requirement gathering to system implementation and customer onboarding.
2015/08 – 2016/06
Part-time Software Engineer
Rakuten Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan
Python PHP Recommender SystemsIn the research organization, I have worked on the development of recommendation algorithms for an online golf booking service. Based on a baseline study, I have conducted further assessments and proposed improvement ideas in terms of both theory and practice.
2012/02 – 2013/02
Part-time Software Engineer
HANASAKE PICTURES, Fukushima, Japan
Objective-C PHP Image ProcessingContributed to the development of (1) PHP applications for an avatar-based social networking service, and (2) an iOS application for virtual trial fitting using an image blending algorithm named Poisson Image Blending.
2011/10 – 2013/03
Part-time Research Assistant / Web Developer
The University of Aizu, Fukushima, Japan
Ruby on Rails Data Visualization GISLed the development of a Ruby on Rails-based web application "Aizu Weather" for regional weather monitoring, accompanied by interactive geospatial data visualization using d3.js.
Education
2015/04 – 2017/03
Master of Information Science and Technology
The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
Degree credential: WES Verified International Academic Qualifications
Thesis: Persistently Cold-Starting Online Item Recommendation for Implicit Feedback Data
Advisor: Dr. Takayasu Matsuo
GPA: 4.0
Activities:
- Served as a student volunteer at RecSys 2016 (Sep 2016)
- Participated in Machine Learning Summer School Kyoto 2015 (Aug 2015)
Internship:
-
R&D Intern at Silver Egg Technology (Dec 2016 – Jan 2017)
- In-depth data analysis on customer's purchase dataset collected from a real-world e-commerce service.
- Proposing a novel recommendation algorithm, which has been a part of my master's thesis, to achieve higher accuracy of recommendation in the long run.
-
Machine Learning Intern at Treasure Data (Aug – Sep 2016)
- Implementing user-defined functions (UDFs) for state-of-the-art recommendation and anomaly detection techniques on Apache Hivemall.
- PoC implementation of a next-generation anomaly detection system for multiple system metrics, collected from an enterprise big data management platform.
2011/04 – 2015/03
B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering
The University of Aizu, Fukushima, Japan
Thesis: User Modeling in Folksonomies: Relational Clustering and Tag Weighting
Advisor: Dr. Masahide Sugiyama
GPA: 3.97
Honors and Awards:
- President's Award — Summa Cum Laude equivalent (2015)
- Dean's List of Distinguished Students (2012 – 2015)
- Best Paper Prize, IEEE Sendai Section Student Awards (2014)
- Innovative Award, The Tokyo American Center and Keio SFC Entrepreneurship Seminar and Business Plan Competition (2012)
Activities:
- Served as a teaching assistant in a Numerical Analysis course, and taught Java coding of numerical methods to 20+ undergraduates (Fall 2014)
- Participated in Security and Programming Camp, a multi-day group training program in computer security (Aug 2011)