Ben Epstein
Co-Founder & CTO at Northeastern University
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Epstein is a technology leader and founder with nine years of experience building production-grade ML and LLM platforms, currently serving as Co-Founder & CTO of Grotto, which applies AI to reduce multifamily vacancy loss. He has led LLM platform design and rollout at EvolutionIQ (part of a $730M acquisition) and previously helped scale embedding and multimodal ML infrastructure as an early engineer at Galileo. A hands-on engineer and educator, Ben teaches MLOps and guest lectures at Northeastern while co-hosting the MLOps Community and running its Boston chapter. He contributes to open-source data tooling—improving vaex for billion-row DataFrame workflows—and advises a slate of startups on scalable ML and LLM productization. Known for turning experimental research into deployed systems, he blends product intuition with low-level engineering across data, infrastructure, and models. Ben holds a CS degree from Washington University in St. Louis and a record of shipping feature stores, ML lifecycle platforms, and large-scale inference systems.
9 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science at Washington University in St. LouisHigh School, High School at Jericho High School
English, Hebrew
Stackoverflow
91reputation
6kreached
8answers
0questions
Github Skills (17)
python10
data-science10
dataframes10
dataframe10
numpy10
data-analysis9
machine-learning8
pyarrow8
hdf7
datatable7
big-data7
tabular7
vaex6
concatenation6
modin6
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
vaexio/vaex
Oct 2021 - Dec 2022
Out-of-Core hybrid Apache Arrow/NumPy DataFrame for Python, ML, visualization and exploration of big tabular data at a billion rows per second 🚀
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Data Scientist
Back-end Developer & Data ScientistContributions:7 reviews, 9 commits, 19 PRs in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Ben contributed to the Vaex project by fixing bugs, improving code quality, and adding features related to data manipulation and processing. They addressed issues with missing imports, improved dataframe functionality by restricting single-column sorting, and removed deprecated numpy code. Furthermore, the user made changes to handle chunked arrays in value counts and added json support to implicit exports.
pythonhybrid-corearrowrowsbigdata
gilakos/astra-money-survey
Nov 2016 - Sep 2022
Contributions:6 PRs, 8 pushes, 5 branches in 5 years 10 months
reactvisualizenanosurveymoney
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