Jason Phillips, PhD

As a senior developer, principle developer, and finally Engineering Manager at Slite, I led and steered the core piece of the product—its advanced, fully collaborative text editor backed by operational transform. I participated at all levels of ideation and project execution, and worked often on low-level optimization, complex features, and even launching a major NLP-based addition.

Slite is also a leader in the space of remote work, both as its internal way of operating (an international remote team), its products which target remote collaboration, and its positioning as a high profile player in the ongoing development & debate over remote work practices. I have operated fully remote during all my years at Slite, even while managing a team with very distant timezones.

Example project: Ask by Slite

Being the lead developer for this AI startup meant becoming an expert in the very latest industry trends in NLP, while also taking on the task—unmatched in the industry—of building a fast NLP pipeline to run entirely in the browser, through leveraging coordination with code compiled to Web Assembly. The entire stack relied on transformers, rust & C++ compilation to WASM, low-level language models like POS tagging and dependency parsing, ontology & language graphs (WordNet) modeled into vector spaces, and other techniques.

More: Browser-based NLP

Working for the Office of Institutional Research for over a decade, I was responsible for constructing numerous data-heavy applications (including the use of machine learning), integration layers, and dynamic presentations, either for the campus community, the administration, or for external bodies and accreditors. As leader of a small web-focused team, I hired and supervised junior developers and graduate students across many projects, spearheading all technical decisions and carrying out projects from initial idea through to stakeholder presentations and deployments.

Selected projects: Credential Mapping, Admissions Tracking & Visualizations, Unified Syllabus Editor, Dynamic Data Reporting, Survey Text Analysis, Accreditation Preparation, Committee Staffing, Tuition Remission

I reshaped an existing prototype application at this start-up by moving its entire data layer into a very large GraphQL schema, and built components and elements across its features, while leading other team members in instruction on best practices and testing design.

More: Brewery Software

• 2017 PhD in Educational Philosophy, Theory, & Foundations - The University of Alabama
• 2008 MA in Philosophy - Boston College
• 2005 BA in Philosophy (minors in German and Music) - The University of South Carolina

More information on my academic background is available here.

Having conducted many technical interviews over the years—and knowing how difficult it is to grasp an applicant’s capabilities from a list of bullet points without at least hearing them walk through past projects—I constructed this site to offer background information on many areas of my work, even if it is necessarily far from comprehensive. Please explore the links above, but do not hesitate to contact me for further information. References available upon request.