Alec Chen
Software Engineer at SpaceX
Los Angeles Metropolitan Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlec Chen is a software engineer with five years of hands-on experience building production systems and research-grade tooling, currently working at SpaceX after multiple engineering roles at Lightspark. He combines a formal CS and statistics education from UIUC with practical internships at Palantir, AbbVie, and P&G, applying data-driven thinking to systems and product problems. Alec contributes to open-source ML tooling—most notably improving the pattern matcher in the tinygrad project—bringing care for correctness via regression tests and refactors. A Bitcoin enthusiast who has participated in Summer of Bitcoin, he blends crypto interest with experience at startups and aerospace, showing a willingness to move between high-assurance and fast-moving environments. Colleagues describe him as technically curious and pragmatic, able to translate research concepts into maintainable code.
6 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignIllinois Mathematics and Science Academy
Github Skills (3)
unit-testing10
pattern-matching10
python10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
tinygrad/tinygrad
May 2024 - Jun 2024
You like pytorch? You like micrograd? You love tinygrad! ❤️
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:6 reviews, 6 PRs, 12 comments in 10 days
Contributions summary:Alec primarily contributed to the development and refinement of the pattern matcher within the `tinygrad` project. Their work involved adding and testing regression tests for the pattern matcher, refactoring the matcher implementation, and updating the code to use UPat structures. This included fixing an arg set issue and making adjustments to the UOps patterns.
pytorch
alecchendev/runner-game
Dec 2020 - May 2021
A 3D runner game to get my hands dirty with Rust, WebAssembly, and WebGL.
Contributions:54 commits, 2 PRs, 37 pushes in 5 months
3drustwebassemblywebgl
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