Featured Research Engineer - Lance Riedel
Before joining Yahoo!, Lance Riedel helped develop search engine technologies for other companies. But, by his own admission, he was “a little on the outside, hooking everything together, but never actually building a search engine from scratch.”
That all changed about a year ago when Riedel joined the engineering group at Yahoo! Research. He was quickly thrown into a new project, helping to design a next-generation search engine from the ground up with a core group of scientists and research engineers.
“It was an incredible experience,” Riedel says. “Everyone on the project was constantly coming up with great ideas. We would bounce new ideas off each other and implement them very rapidly. It didn’t matter if you were an engineer or a research scientist, everyone had the opportunity to put their ideas into action.”
Riedel wasn’t always interested in computer science. As a boy, he dreamed of being the first person on Mars. He was also fascinated with airplanes, which led him to study aerospace engineering at the University of Texas. Half way through, he realized that there were very few jobs in the field at the time, so he switched to computer science at Principia College.
His love for aerospace still remains, however. About ten years ago, Riedel earned his pilot’s license. He even bought his own plane. But he sold it after the recent arrivals of his two young children. He’s now hooked on hang gliding. “I love the cool, quiet feeling of being up in the air,” he says. “Plus, hang gliding is a lot cheaper than flying planes.”
These days, Riedel’s children keep him grounded, but he finds plenty of things to do around the house. “I always have a car in the driveway that I’m tinkering with, or I’m trying to build a new dining room table,” he says. “I also spend a great deal of time brushing off my old math books and trying to learn more complicated algorithms that are in daily use at Yahoo!. I wish I had known what math was for back in college, I would have enjoyed it more.”
The thing Riedel loves most about Yahoo! Research is that there is no end to the projects he can work on. “I look out five years and think, Wow, I’m going to learn so much more,” he says. “Every day I’m here, I feel like I’m exploring new worlds.”
It may not be Mars, but it’s the next best thing.
