Austin Dickey is a senior software engineer and full-stack data scientist with nine years of experience building and productionizing machine learning systems and developer tooling. He has led end-to-end efforts—from architecting a modern training and prediction engine that improved weather forecasts by 40% to driving performance improvements in the Apache Arrow ecosystem and GPU-native query engines. At Posit he’s enhancing the Positron IDE and Python extension functionality, while his open-source DevOps work on high-profile projects like Apache Arrow and Facebook’s Velox focuses on benchmarking, CI automation, and performance regression detection using Conbench. Comfortable across C++, Go, Python, and benchmarking pipelines, he blends low-level performance engineering with pragmatic ML deployment and monitoring. Based in Mount Prospect, IL, he pairs applied math and physics training from Northwestern with a quiet obsession for squeezing latency and variability out of data systems.
9 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS) Applied Mathematics, Bachelor of Science (BS) Applied Mathematics at Northwestern University
A composable and fully extensible C++ execution engine library for data management systems.
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer & Performance Engineer
Contributions:45 reviews, 8 commits, 14 PRs in 3 months
Contributions summary:Austin's contributions primarily center on integrating and enhancing the benchmarking and alerting infrastructure within the repository. They've implemented and updated GitHub Actions to leverage the Conbench service for performance regression detection, utilizing the GitHub Checks API. The user also introduced features to upload benchmark results to Conbench, utilizing benchadapt and its capabilities. Furthermore, they have modified the benchmark-alert script to post GitHub check results and PR comments, and updated the benchalerts library to improve the benchmarking pipeline.
Apache Arrow is the universal columnar format and multi-language toolbox for fast data interchange and in-memory analytics
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
Contributions:6 reviews, 2 commits, 15 PRs in 23 days
Contributions summary:Austin primarily contributed to improving the Go benchmarking scripts within the Apache Arrow project. Their work involved fixing GitHub information reporting, ensuring compatibility with the Conbench server and client, and adapting to new benchmarking environments. The user also refactored the build process by integrating C++ microbenchmarks into the benchmarking environments, reducing build times and dependencies.
memorymulti-languagetoolboxacceleratedarrow
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Austin Dickey - Senior Software Engineer at Posit PBC