Photo credit: Michelle Smarr
Hi, my name is Joseph Smarr.I live in Half Moon Bay, CA and I’m currently a Principal Engineer at Shopify. Before that, I was Chief Technology Officer at Triller. Before that, I was a Principal Engineer at Google, where I worked on Google Assistant, Google Photos, and Google+ (I co-created the stories and the Circles sharing model for Google+). Before that, I was Chief Technology Officer at Plaxo. I’ve been building web sites since 1993, when my dad eagerly brought home an alpha version of this “mosaic” software his center was working on. I grew up in Urbana, IL and went to the University Laboratory High School there. I then went to Stanford University, where I received a BS and an MS in Symbolic Systems, with a concentration in Artificial Intelligence. While there I did some research in Natural Language Processing with Chris Manning and Dan Klein. I met my wife Michelle at Stanford in July 2002 and we’ve been happily married since June 2005 (we now also have two lovely kids). In my copious free time, I enjoy playing electric guitar (rock, metal, and blues), soccer, and rollerblading. I also love food and wine. But mainly I love building technology that empowers people.