My TechNation Application - November 2021

I have up to 10 pieces of evidence, 3 recommendation letters and my personal statement.

Back story: I started my journey in tech as a software engineer in 2012, then I worked in many big tech companies in verticals such as Payments and Cloud. I currently work in the UK leveraging similarity models at scale for reducing societal harm caused by harmful content in a reputed big tech company. Here, I lead strategic initiatives that employ state of the art deep learning models that help detect known violating content such as child nudity, graphic violence etc through perceptual and semantic similarity.

Application category: Exceptional Talent

Here’s the order of my documents, kindly review them;

Recommendation Letters

  • RL 1 is from the Director of a reputed big tech company. He has a solid foundation in the company and has been running the payments business ranging from products to infrastructure as a platform for well over 15 years. They acknowledge my leadership being instrumental in many initiatives over several years.
  • RL 2 is from the Senior principal engineer of a reputed big tech company. He has been in the payments and AI business for well over 15 years.They acknowledge my leadership being instrumental in developing a multi-year plan.
  • RL 3 is from the Senior engineering manager of a reputed big tech company where he runs a non profit aspect within the company, related to my current work. He has worked at fortune 500 companies for over 20 years. He acknowledges my current work having societal impact and my on-going leadership unlocking more.

Personal Statement

Up to 957 words; 65% of which talked about my 10+ years background, 20% talked about my plans for coming to the UK and 15% talked about my contributions to the UK’s digital economy and future plans.

Mandatory Criteria

  • MC 1 - I command a high salary for my services, as evidenced by my employment contracts with salary information including any bonus and equity options and history of earnings.
    • Evidence includes: Write-up detailing my compensation increases; P60; Showing initial and future stock grants ; Performance letter acknowledging being in top bracket at a senior role ; Quoted a post from a respected local agency with their data on the mean salary in the industry in the region
  • MC2 - I led the growth of a product-led digital technology company; an infrastructure-as-a service platform. My leadership helped ensure that customer’s payment data was compliant with local government regulations and was instrumental in creating a technical strategy for improving the infrastructure by reducing the risk of outages bringing down the experience.
    • Evidence includes: news clipping from government websites regarding regulation ; news clipping to demonstrate the revenue impact and subsequently the risk of non compliance; screenshots showing the user experience to indicate how the data is being localised ; 2 RLs acknowledging my leadership in both areas.
  • MC 3 - I led the growth of a social enterprise; I am leading initiatives employing state of the art deep learning models to scan billions of content to prevent viewer and victim harm on social media.
    • Evidence includes: screenshot of how my work helps reduce child nudity, adult nudity and other harmful areas ; commit history of closed repo ; news clipping of the platform and its impact; acknowledgement of the system publicly instrumental in reducing harm; RL acknowledging my leadership and contributions.
  • MC 4 - I led the growth of a product-led digital technology company by helping expand the footprint to FR, IT, and ES.
    • Evidence includes: screenshots of revenue, customer reviews, news clippings from industry-related blogs about the company, screenshots showing the user experience built; RL talking about my leadership

Optional Criteria - Innovation

  • IC 1 - Innovated on scaling similarity infrastructure: Strategized a state of the art index that can be leveraged for recommendations. Launched these capabilities for different business verticals within the company.
    • Evidence includes: high level strategy reflecting the why and the what; news clipping from industry-related blogs on applications; Supporting Letters talking about my innovation on using similarity horizontally across the company.
  • IC 2 - Leverage Machine Learning for Payments as a fallback in case of unavailability of payment processor/gateway: Strategize a StandIn solution that would kick-in in case there was an outage on the 60+ external payment processors integrated by the company
    • Evidence includes: high level strategy reflecting the why and the what; Supporting Letters talking about my contribution
  • IC 3 - Performance Bonus Letter @ Big Tech
    • Evidence includes: shows 200% bonus and calls out me being in the top percentile at my senior role.

Optional Criteria - Significant Contribution

  • SC 1 - Significant Contribution - Payments increase in revenue
    • Evidence includes: Write-up reflecting what was launched, called out quotations from RL into the narrative, Added supporting letter describing business impact.
  • SC 2 - Significant Contribution - Reducing payments delay to sellers in X M $ and helping company deprecate Oracle
    • Evidence includes: Write-up reflecting what was launched, called out quotations from RL into the narrative, Added supporting letter describing business impact.
  • SC 3 - Significant Contribution - Impact on Similarity and it’s applications
    • Evidence includes: Write-up reflecting what was launched, called out quotations from RL into the narrative, Added supporting letter describing business impact.

Kindly share your opinion please

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Hey @Francisca_Chiedu , @Victrr , and @somdipdey may I please request from you to review please? It’d be great to hear your feedback as I’ve seen past threads where your feedback has been very key in improving the applications.

Commenting, despite not being explicitly asked - your package looks pretty solid. I really hope with achievements you outlined, you do get the Ex. Talent.

QQ:

You earlier mentioned you already work in UK at big tech. So in personal statement, do you include “working in big tech in XYZ domain” as one of the plans for entering UK or things outside that?

Thanks in advance.

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what do you mean by writeup? Are this external validation of your contribution or just xplanatory note?

fo the recommendation letters, they should explain how the author knows the applicant; and

  • Knows the applicant’s achievements in the relevant field; and
  • How the author considers the applicant shows exceptional talent or promise; and
  • the contribution the applicant would make to the UK digital economy.

what do you mean by writeup? Are this external validation of your contribution or just xplanatory note?

A mix of both. I point out a summary of what I did, add some external references and then tie together a supporting letter attesting the same. Since I no longer work at this firm, it’s nearly impossible to find more proof that a supporting letter. Is that acceptable?

fo the recommendation letters, they should explain how the author knows the applicant; and

Agreed. I have gotten these 3 areas vetted from these experts in the field.

do you include “working in big tech in XYZ domain” as one of the plans for entering UK or things outside that?

I mentioned that in my personal statement that my work here would continue to deliver societal impact. I also want to advocate my long term professional plans more by advancing he field of AI applications and start mentoring outside of my current company.

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it is acceptable but just be mindful that reference letters alone are not sufficient

Got it. One clarification I wanted to get as well. There isn’t “hard” link to the work done by me on news articles, especially on past companies. How I am going about this is

  • Explain what my role was, how my leadership was instrumental in innovation and/or significant contribution depending on the criteria. I’m not planning on re-using the same artefacts for all 3
  • Show screenshots of the user experience that was built out along with links to the product and/or government regulation. Show some public numbers of how the business was/is doing.
  • Spin a narrative with the recommendation letter for the mandatory criteria and in the case of significant contribution/innovation append a supporting letter. My hope is that this is enough of a “soft” link to the work done.