Beau J Bender

Over the last several years, many companies have started focusing on what I call the “DEI-Iceberg” - increasing the percent of underrepresented employees in a visible and measurable way. While that‘s a critical first step, just like an arctic iceberg, it represents only 10% of the actual space. That’s why I focus on the other 90%. I strive to help marginalized folks shine wherever they are, helping them thrive in their current roles and also finding new opportunities that better suit their unique skills and super-powers. I help them see around corners, challenge their assumptions, and provide perspectives that they can’t see within their current network. And by connecting them with similar folks elsewhere, they gain opportunity exposure and critically grow their support and professional networks. Having access to senior leadership can help folks quickly grow and provide highly impactful feedback, but numerous studies have shown that many women and people of color have less access than their more privileged peers. When coupled with the fact that many managers are less skilled at presenting meaningful feedback or know how to support a diverse team, careers can stagnate. This is why I focus on both providing the coaching that they are not receiving from their current manager and serve as a surrogate for a senior leader within their company. And by coaching existing leaders on Inclusive Leadership and Allyskills, I help them to grow and support their teams. Whether it’s growing psychologically (like learning how to tame that nasty Impostor Syndrome) or technically (perhaps building your first computer vision solution), everyone needs support. How can I support you? 😃

At the end of 2018 I made a big move: after 17 years of working within the industry, I decided to leave the corporate world to grow my skills while traveling abroad. During this time I’ve applied my newfound knowledge by building solutions for the company I co-founded, Milly’s Kitchen. • While reviewing our Google Analytics I found that our domain received lower than expected organic search traffic. Using a variety of tools, I identified several image and markup related issues that contributed to our poor ranking. After validating my approach on a single page, I created a cross-platform iOS app to generate structured data for better event discovery, output SEO-optimized markup and export sets of images optimized for different browsers (e.g., webp, jp2, etc.) and screen sizes. These changes increased monthly organic search traffic for Milly’s Kitchen by 10x and search impressions by 50x. • I developed a natural language assistant designed to help users find content conversationally. Users interacted using their voice or keyboard and could issue follow-up statements to pivot the conversation. Rich results were shown to the user, which they could navigate either with touch or voice. In order to serve relevant content, I created a full ingestion pipeline in Azure using serverless functions, durable functions, analytics, alerting and CosmosDB. This included a crawler, conflation and entity extraction engine, a static document-based ranker, an indexer, and multi-region database. Each service was deployed via its own continuous delivery pipeline via Azure DevOps Pipelines. • I’m currently prototyping an image ingestion pipeline that uses deep learning to extract faces and objects from incoming images. This leverages a custom model built using Python and Dlib and will be hosted in an AWS server-less environment.