Brandon Willard
Co-founder And Chief Science Officer at .txt
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrandon Willard is an applied mathematician and machine learning engineer with 14 years of experience building Bayesian and probabilistic systems for real-time, production environments at startups and mid-sized companies. As Co-founder and Chief Science Officer at .txt and former Staff AI Research Engineer at Normal Computing, he blends hands-on model development with production infrastructure design, including AWS-backed Kubernetes, Airflow, and Dask deployments. He’s led high-dimensional Bayesian shrinkage projects in industry (Ampersand) and contributed to core open-source libraries like PyMC, Aesara, PyTensor, Numba, and Hy—improving probabilistic programming, computation-graph debugging, and testing for widely used numerical tooling. A mentor and educator who taught data science and advises civic and academic projects, he also spends spare time refining Emacs, building developer-facing math tools, and imagining novel interfaces like HUDs for coding. His work shows a rare mix of deep statistical theory, practical systems engineering, and sustained open-source stewardship.
14 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
B.S. and Minor Physics and Mathematics, B.S. and Minor Physics and Mathematics at Wayne State UniversityCertificates in Physics Physik, Certificates in Physics Physik at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität MünchenM.S. Statistics, M.S. Statistics at University of Chicago
German
Stackoverflow
21reputation
522reached
3answers
0questions
Github Skills (53)
debugging10
debug10
maintenance10
py10
python10
testing10
statistics10
machine-learning10
interpreter10
regex10
numpy10
regular-expression10
mcmc10
bayesian10
compiler-design10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
aesara-devs/aesara
Apr 2020 - Jan 2023
Aesara is a Python library for defining, optimizing, and efficiently evaluating mathematical expressions involving multi-dimensional arrays.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Library Maintainer
Back-end Developer & Library MaintainerContributions:74 releases, 1026 reviews, 1257 commits in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Brandon primarily contributes to the Aesara library by extending functionality related to printing and debugging computation graphs, adding features like auto-naming and the inclusion of operator information within the output. They also refactored parts of the codebase, including moving debug functions and adding a new mixin to represent graphs. The contributions involve improvements in graph representation with detailed documentation.
multi-dimensionalpythonmathematical-expressionsautomatic-differentiationoptimizing-compiler
pymc-devs/pymc
Apr 2016 - Nov 2022
Bayesian Modeling and Probabilistic Programming in Python
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Data Scientist
Back-end Developer & Data ScientistContributions:224 reviews, 276 commits, 80 PRs in 6 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Brandon contributed significantly to the PyMC3 project, focusing on enhancing its probabilistic programming capabilities. Their work included implementing missing import aliases and adding type filters for Theano nodes to be passed as arguments, indicating a focus on code maintainability and integration with the underlying computation engine. Furthermore, the user added tests for new features and modified the implementation of the Mixture distribution mode computation and logp dimensions to improve its functionality.
pythonbayesian-inferencestatistical-inferencemachine-learningprobabilistic-programming
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.