Daniel Hiltgen
Software Engineer at Ollama
Los Altos, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDaniel Hiltgen is a seasoned software engineer based in Los Altos with over 10 years of experience building cloud, virtualization, and container infrastructure. He currently works on Ollama’s back-end and DevOps, improving build systems for Llama-family models—adding cgo support for llama.cpp, expanding ROCm and CPU-only builds, and hardening download/error handling. His prior roles as a senior staff engineer at Docker and VMware and as CTO/co‑founder of Netkine span design and delivery of control planes, Auto Deploy/PXE boot systems, OpenStack/KVM cloud stacks, and rapid cluster provisioning tools. Known for pragmatic, systems-level engineering, he has shipped kernel modules for NTFS-backed block access and even prototyped Kubernetes integration that was approved at Docker’s executive level.
11 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo
Github Skills (11)
c1710
error-handling10
cgo10
build-system10
go10
c1110
devops9
c-programming-language9
roc9
c-language9
cuda9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
ollama/ollama
Sep 2023 - Mar 2025
Get up and running with Llama 3.3, DeepSeek-R1, Phi-4, Gemma 3, and other large language models.
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:505 reviews, 819 PRs, 450 pushes in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Daniel primarily contributed to the back-end infrastructure of the project. Their work involved implementing error handling for downloads and adding support for cgo implementations of llama.cpp. They also refined build processes and dependency management, improving the ability to build CPU-only versions. Furthermore, they integrated a ROCM build and expanded the build platform support.
deepseekgemmagemma2gemma3go
dhiltgen/docker-machine-kvm
Sep 2015 - Apr 2017
KVM driver for docker-machine
Contributions:12 releases, 9 commits, 11 PRs in 1 year 7 months
kvmdocker-machinelibvirtdockerminikube
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