Blake Haugen
Principal Data Engineer
Arlington Heights, Illinois, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBlake Haugen is a Principal Data Engineer with 12 years of experience building high-performance, scalable data pipelines and machine learning systems across insurance and analytics firms. He combines deep academic expertise—a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Tennessee focused on performance modeling and task-based runtime simulation—with hands-on production work at Kettle, American Family Insurance, Allstate, and PYA Analytics. Blake has a track record of optimizing compute-intensive workloads (including prior work that sped optimization code by 3x) and contributes to open-source projects like rapidsai/cudf, improving DataFrame operations for GPU-accelerated analytics. He mentors engineers on best practices for data engineering and has led teams through production-grade migrations and performance tuning. Based in Arlington Heights, IL, he blends rigorous research methods with pragmatic software delivery to solve large-scale data challenges. An unusual strength is his background in both numerical linear algebra performance modeling and applied meteorology, which gives him a unique perspective on scientific and business data workflows.
12 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science at University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleBachelor of Arts (B.A.), Computer Science and Engineering Science, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Computer Science and Engineering Science at Wartburg CollegeMaster of Science - MS, Geosciences with a concentration in Applied Meteorology, Master of Science - MS, Geosciences with a concentration in Applied Meteorology at Mississippi State University
Github Skills (11)
dataframes10
cudf10
python10
dataframe10
c-language7
cprogramming-language7
cpp7
pandas5
cuda5
data-analysis4
gpu4
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
rapidsai/cudf
Nov 2018 - Dec 2018
cuDF - GPU DataFrame Library
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:16 commits, 1 PR, 7 comments in 14 days
Contributions summary:Blake primarily contributed to the `cudf` library by implementing and refactoring DataFrame methods. They added functionality for dropping columns, including `drop` and `drop_column` methods, and addressed related testing. The user also modified code for merging operations and fixed whitespace issues for PEP8 compliance. The user deprecated the `drop_column` method and refactored its implementation.
cudadataframe-librarydata-analysiscppcudf
bahaugen/top500vis
Oct 2013 - May 2015
Contributions:33 commits, 1 push in 1 year 7 months
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