Austen Groener
Head Of ML & Principal Applied Scientist at Cherish
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAusten Groener is a Head of ML and Principal Applied Scientist with 12+ years of experience building production-ready computer vision and AI systems, currently leading ML at Cherish after a senior Applied Scientist role at Amazon. He combines deep academic rigor—a Ph.D. in Physics studying dark matter distributions—with hands-on engineering of SAR, EO/IR, and satellite-scale ATR pipelines developed at Lockheed Martin. His work spans object detection, segmentation, model compression, XAI, and active learning, and he has led teams that turned research into globally scalable tools for geospatial intelligence. An active contributor to astrophysics open-source projects like astropy/astroquery and astropy, he brings data-first back-end engineering experience alongside QA and documentation efforts. Known for bridging novel signal-processing research with practical distributed implementations (Python, C++, AWS, Spark), he excels at translating complex scientific problems into deployable ML products.
12 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Physics, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Physics at Hartwick CollegeDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Physics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Physics at Drexel University
English, French
Github Skills (17)
pytest10
python10
astronomy10
testing10
format-table10
formatting10
beautifulsoup10
astropy10
http-request10
api-design9
apim9
api9
documentation9
data-analysis8
database8
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
astropy/astroquery
Oct 2013 - Nov 2017
Functions and classes to access online data resources. Maintainers: @keflavich and @bsipocz and @ceb8
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Data Scientist
Back-end Developer & Data ScientistContributions:186 commits, 2 PRs, 18 comments in 4 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Austen primarily contributed to building the query tool for the CosmoSim database. Their work involved implementing database exploration and schema retrieval tools to improve the querying experience. Furthermore, the user developed the functionality to manage, sort, and delete jobs, demonstrating a focus on the workflow and management of data retrieval within the system. The integration of database schema exploration and job management capabilities suggest a combined back-end development and data-oriented role.
pythondataastropy-affiliatedastropyastronomy
astropy/astropy
Sep 2014 - Mar 2015
Astronomy and astrophysics core library
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & QA Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA EngineerContributions:13 commits, 29 comments, 2 issues in 6 months
Contributions summary:Austen primarily focused on enhancing the `astropy/astropy` library's table functionality, introducing column alignment features. They implemented new formatting options and added corresponding tests to ensure proper functionality and usability. Additionally, the user contributed to the project documentation by adding examples of the new alignment features within the documentation.
astrologypythonscienceastrophysicsastrodynamics
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