Aaron Sarna is a Senior Software Engineer based in Cambridge, MA with six years of professional experience blending web development, browser extensions, and machine learning research. Currently at Google, he applies practical ML engineering to computer vision and NLP, contributing notable improvements to high-profile Google Research projects like SupCon and the Scenic JAX library (adding optimizers, fixing activations, and improving checkpoint resumption). His background includes shipping popular cross-browser extensions (Forecastfox) and low-latency systems work from internships in HFT and web infrastructure, giving him a rare mix of front-end UX, systems performance, and ML model-tuning expertise. Comfortable across the stack, he focuses on reproducible training, optimizer and hyperparameter work, and browser-native UX. Collected studies in CS, cognitive science, and Near Eastern studies hint at a broad intellectual curiosity that informs both product thinking and research-driven engineering.
6 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
BA, Computer Science, Cognitive Studies, Near Eastern Studies, BA, Computer Science, Cognitive Studies, Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University
high school diploma, high school diploma at Maimonides School
Scenic: A Jax Library for Computer Vision Research and Beyond
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
Contributions:5 commits in 3 months
Contributions summary:Aaron primarily contributed to the core machine learning aspects of the Scenic library. Their work included adding a LARS optimizer, correcting a missing GELU activation in a BERT model layer, and modifying the training utils. They also made changes relating to how a job restarts and the global step is handled during resuming model training from a checkpoint, ensuring correct randomization.
Contributions summary:Aaron contributed significantly to the SupCon (Supervised Contrastive Learning) project within the Google Research repository. Their work focused on fine-tuning hyperparameters, including learning rates, weight decay, and optimizer parameters (RMSProp and LARS), across multiple ResNet architectures (ResNet50, ResNet101, ResNet200) for the ImageNet dataset. The user also addressed software compatibility and bug fixes as well as updating and adapting loss functions.
googlemachine-learningai
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