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

2022/09 – Present

Freelance Software Developer

Self-employed in British Columbia, Canada

Python Google Cloud Apache Beam Data Engineering Natural Language Processing

Helping 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

2023/08 – Present

Information and Communication Technology Advisor

Mzuzu Entrepreneur Hub, Mzuzu, Malawi

C# .NET Digital Marketing

As a Canadian international volunteer from the World University Service of Canada, I promoted 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. The work is highlighted in an article "Spotlight on Takuya: An Uplifting Volunteer Experience" at wusc.ca.

  • Conducted an organization-wide ICT capacity assessment to make strategic recommendations, including stakeholder engagements.
  • Trained 19 Malawian young people (9 females, 10 males) in the age 18-31 through a 3-month course for Python Computer Programming.
  • Achieved up to 50% performance improvement of their Flask-based web application in terms of the Lighthouse Performance metrics.
  • Implemented the organization's digital marketing infrastructure with HubSpot and launched a series of campaigns, while transferring best practices to the local staff members.
  • Took a Program, Project, and Product Manager role in an incomplete, suspended, and significantly delayed project for an Android-based e-learning application. The app has been launched in the Google Play.
Although the one-year volunteer assignment ended, I am continuing the advisory work as a contractor through my Canadian self-employed business.

2021/08 – 2022/08

Software Development Engineer - Personalization

Amazon, Vancouver, BC, Canada

TypeScript Scala Python AWS Apache Spark Apache Airflow Recommender Systems

Worked 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

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)

Python Apache Hive IoT Data Science Product Management

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:

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 Systems

In 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 Processing

Contributed 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 GIS

Led 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:

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:

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)