About

Adam Lindsay is a Senior Software Engineer in the Recommendation Services and Algorithms team at Netflix, with a passion for media application development, systems, architecture, and operations in the cloud. He was the technical co-founder behind Social Genius, Inc, an innovative company that created social music streaming applications. Adam was responsible for three years of effort from earliest prototype to scale, crafting a responsive, horizontally-scalable back-end with a consistent social recommendation API presented to both native iOS and HTML5 clients over several product iterations. Adam is also a Research Fellow at the Computing Department of Lancaster University, UK, culminating in a successful completion of his PhD. He was the university's technical research lead on many EU- and UK-funded projects. This followed 3.5 years at Starlab NV/SA in Belgium as a Principal Research Scientist spearheading involvement in its multimedia research projects and ventures. Throughout his time at both Lancaster University and Starlab, Adam was involved in MPEG standardization. He was co-editor of the MPEG-7 Audio standard, leading the MPEG-7 Audio standardisation effort for several years, and then moved on to be co-editor of the MPEG-7 Systems standard. Much of his work forms the foundations in parts of the MPEG-21 and MPEG-A standards. Adam is proficient in Python, Polyglot, NoSQL, distributed systems, large-scale web architecture, metadata, music, International Standardisation, project management, multimedia, MPEG, MPEG-7, Riak, Redis, CouchDB, MongoDB, Facebook OpenGraph, and seeing the big picture. He received two Bachelors of Science from MIT and a Masters in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab. Adam's past experiences include being an Independent Web Consultant, where he architected and managed the development of a Node.js and pgSQL RESTful storage engine for flexible, concurrent storage of "facts" generated in a multi-user, multi-device installation. He also drove the development of the custom "music and social intelligence" back-end of the SocialGenius platform, first featured in the AudioVroom product. Adam is a seasoned professional with 13.13 years of relevant experience. He is an expert in software engineering, research science, backend, web, Redis, NoSQL, MongoDB, iOS, Python, and Javascript.