Justin Garcia

iOS and real-time speech AI products
Portfolio | Email | GitHub | LinkedIn
I ship real-time speech AI products at Kotoba. I previously worked for 9 years at Apple on Siri's initial release, iOS text input and WebKit's editing engine.

Experience:

Kotoba (August 2025 - Present)Tokyo
Senior Software Engineer
I do product engineering at Kotoba, a frontier speech AI company.
  • Built the first version of live-translation bots for Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, helping drive Kotoba’s pivot to enterprise sales
  • Helped build subscriptions into Kotoba’s low-latency speech translation app, which reached $400k USD ARR in 5 months
  • Helped ship Kotoba’s on-device Japanese text-to-speech for Meta. Improved inference performance and memory footprint
  • Created release automation for iOS, Android, and OTA updates, and automated benchmark runs for new speech-to-speech translation models
Career break (April 2024 - August 2025)Tokyo
I relocated to Japan, studied Japanese, learned Rails, and built most of the backend for a YouTube summarizer, which I demoed at Google's Tokyo campus.
Procore (July 2018 - March 2024)California
Senior iOS Software Engineer
I worked on Procore for iOS, the mobile app for a leading global construction management platform.
  • Designed and built the iOS subsystem that lets enterprise clients like Amazon customize the app
  • Fixed 50+ high-volume crashes impacting customers
  • Cut iOS build time by ~20% (30s) by extracting stable code into a prebuilt binary
iHeartMedia (December 2016 - October 2017)New York City
iOS Software Engineer
I worked on iHeartRadio for iOS, a music streaming service.
  • Shipped redesigned podcast browsing and playback
Career break (May 2014 - November 2016)
I worked at an early-stage startup in San Francisco called Musey and helped them ship a couple of iPhone apps. Then I moved back to my hometown to spend time with my father, who passed away in 2015.
Apple (June 2005 - April 2014)Cupertino
Software Engineer
  • Led development on keyboard dictation for Siri’s initial release
  • Presented at WWDC in 2011 and 2012 on the iOS text input system
  • Built most of the Siri streaming animation that was new in iOS 8
  • Made Cut / Copy / Paste fast enough for the first iPhone (performance tuning)
  • Maintained WebKit’s WYSIWYG editing engine (which powers Mail) for 3 years

Independent products:

Designed, built, and shipped native Apple-platform products.

Education:

Rice University (September 2001 - May 2005), B.A. in Computer Science

Patents:

Mapping application search function (Apple)