Geren White

Geren White has a strong background in engineering and software development. They started their career as a Java Software Developer at CYBRA Corporation, where they maintained and developed Java-based web and desktop applications. They provided technical opinions, drove new development, and refactored and redesigned existing code bases.

In 2014, Geren joined 1stdibs.com as a Java Software Engineer, where they actively developed and maintained the company's service-oriented architecture. They collaborated with a data scientist to design and build a recommendation service. They then progressed to a role as a Senior Java Developer, where they implemented large-scale data processing jobs using AWS EMR, developed Apache Spark applications for generating recommendations, and improved the recommendation engine by migrating it from Google BigQuery to AWS EMR.

Geren continued to advance their career at 1stdibs.com, taking on the position of Lead Java Developer, where they managed two developers and provided guidance on project designs through code reviews. They also coordinated the availability of developers for cross-team projects. They were later promoted to Associate Director, Engineering, and then Director, Engineering, leading the Search and Personalization team through a complete overhaul of the search functionality on the site. They developed a long-term plan for a data-driven search system, focused on understanding queries, improving sort order ranking, and relaxing query constraints.

Most recently, Geren held the position of Senior Director, Engineering at 1stdibs.com, where they oversaw and developed the first Python services to support the company's machine learning needs. They played a key role in adopting Terraform at 1stdibs.com and developed reusable modules for efficiently deploying container-based services on AWS Elastic Container Service. As a result of their initial search improvements, the site saw decreased search abandon rates, increased product detail views, higher click-through rates, and more product favorites from searches.

Overall, Geren's work experience demonstrates their expertise and contributions in engineering, software development, data processing, recommendation systems, and search functionality improvement.

Geren White earned a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in Computer Engineering from the University at Buffalo from 2008 to 2012.