Welcoming Jason Jiang to Palona as Head of Product Engineering

Building a company is ultimately about bringing together the right people at the right moment.

Today, I'm excited to share that Jason Jiang has joined Palona as our Head of Product Engineering.

Jason spent the last ten years at Facebook/Meta, where he helped build and scale Facebook Groups from a few million users into one of the world's largest community products, reaching over a billion active users. More recently, he led Meta's GenAI work for Groups, bringing new AI-powered experiences to Facebook users around the world.

That combination is rare: deep product intuition, strong engineering judgment, and the ability to build systems that work reliably at global scale. Jason understands what it means to create products that people use every day, in real contexts, with real expectations. He also understands that great AI products are not just about model capability. They are about product quality, reliability, trust, and usefulness in the moments that matter.

I've known Jason for many years. We first met at Yahoo when he was a new graduate from UCLA. Even then, he left a strong impression on me. He was quiet and humble, but deeply thoughtful. He listened carefully, asked sharp questions, and had the kind of product and engineering instincts that make teams better around him. Over the years, he has grown into exactly the kind of leader I remembered he could become: grounded, high-integrity, impact-driven, and strong without needing to be loud.

Palona is at an important inflection point. We are building AI that moves beyond demos and into real-world operations, AI that can listen, see, reason, take action, and help businesses serve their customers better every day. As we scale our platform across voice, vision, and workflow automation, we need leaders who know how to build ambitious products with discipline, care, and customer obsession.

Jason brings that experience and mindset to Palona. He has built products for massive communities, led product and machine learning teams through ambiguity, and worked on AI experiences designed for billions of people.

At Palona, he will help us strengthen the bridge between research, product, and engineering as we build practical, production-ready AI for the physical world.

In his own words: "The team is tackling a hard and deeply meaningful problem: bringing AI into real-world operations where quality, reliability, and trust matter every day. What drew me here is the combination of technical ambition, product discipline, and genuine respect for the work our customers do."

These hires are meaningful for the future of Palona. They are evidence of our commitment to our mission and to the customers who are trusting us to bring AI into some of the most operationally complex environments. We are building a team that can match the size of the opportunity, not just with talent, but with humility, rigor, and a deep respect for the real-world work our products are here to support.

I feel incredibly fortunate to welcome Jason to Palona, and I'm excited to build this next chapter together.