Jey Kottalam
Co-Founder CEO at Taste Institute
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJey Kottalam is a seasoned software founder and engineer blending theory and hands-on practice across cloud, data, and genomics systems. As Co-Founder and CEO of Taste Institute, he leads visionary product development for Rarebird while architecting back-end and distributed systems at scale. With 13+ years of experience, he has driven performance improvements and architectural refactors in genomics platforms (ADAM) and big-data projects (Spark), optimizing throughput and reducing contention in mission-critical components. His career spans leadership and hands-on roles—from Co-Founder/CTO of meetyou to senior roles at Berkeley's AMPLab/RISELab-backed initiatives and consulting firms—demonstrating a rare ability to translate research ideas into production-grade software. An active open-source contributor, his work touches genomics data formats, Spark testing/build pipelines, and other back-end systems, reflecting a broad curiosity across languages and ecosystems. Based in San Francisco, he combines entrepreneurial grit with deep technical depth to ship scalable, reliable systems and explore new frontiers in data-intensive computing.
13 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
WikipediaY Combinator
English, Tamil
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (20)
apache-spark10
python10
scala210
scala10
bioinformatics10
genomics10
testing9
java9
javas9
parquet9
data-structures8
data-structure8
build-automation8
datastructures8
spark8
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
mesos/spark
Mar 2013 - Sep 2013
Lightning-fast cluster computing in Java, Scala and Python.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:96 commits in 6 months
Contributions summary:Jey made contributions focused on improving the testing and build processes of the Spark project. They refactored test initialization in streaming modules, bumped the development version, and addressed issues in Python examples. Further contributions included the removal of unnecessary dependencies, code style improvements, and adjustments to the Python daemon and PySpark exception reporting.
pythoncluster-computinglightningsparkscala
bigdatagenomics/adam
Dec 2013 - Apr 2014
ADAM is a genomics analysis platform with specialized file formats built using Apache Avro, Apache Spark, and Apache Parquet. Apache 2 licensed.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:77 commits in 4 months
Contributions summary:Jey primarily contributed to the ADAM genomics analysis platform by implementing and modifying core backend functionalities. Their work involved optimizing the `bam2adam` command for increased throughput and reducing lock contention. They also worked on refactoring and improving the `SnpTable` model and associated code, including fixing a crash in SNP handling. Further, they made improvements to BQSR (Base Quality Score Recalibration), demonstrating a focus on performance and efficiency within the genomics analysis domain.
pythonbioinformaticsadamlicensedbig-data
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