Chris Kao
Chesapeake, Virginia, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Kao is a versatile senior data scientist with 24 years of experience applying machine learning, NLP, LLMs, and statistical modeling across biotech, telecom, health, and fintech. He pairs hands-on engineering—contributions to high-profile open-source projects like JupyterHub, Kubernetes spawners, AngularJS, and Sequelize—with product-minded AI work such as contact center automation, multimodal LLMs for claims processing, and OCR-driven document understanding. Chris has a rare blend of startup founder chops (scaled a live-plant business to Amazon Best Seller status) and enterprise delivery at firms like Verizon and WEX, enabling him to translate technical innovation into measurable KPIs. He’s practiced in production ML tooling and MLOps (Spark, Docker, LangGraph, Azure/GCP) and has improved CI/CD and deployment pipelines in complex Kubernetes environments. Known for collaborative cross-functional work, he also brings experimental-design rigor from an academic background (Analytics and MBA, near-perfect GPAs) and practical lab experience in analytical chemistry. Pragmatic and curious, Chris often surfaces simple operational fixes in large systems that materially improve reliability and observability.
24 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree, Analytics, 4.0, Master's degree, Analytics, 4.0 at Georgia Institute of TechnologyMaster of Business Administration - MBA, Business Administration and Management, General, 3.96, Master of Business Administration - MBA, Business Administration and Management, General, 3.96 at Gies College of Business - University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignBachelor of Science (B.S.), Biochemistry, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Biochemistry at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chinese, Spanish
Github Skills (71)
postgresql10
python10
testing10
command-line-interface10
databases10
c1110
c1710
bbpress10
i18n-js10
javascript10
event-handling10
webcam10
kubernetes-cluster10
dockers10
uid10
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
hackfoldr/hackfoldr
Mar 2013 - Aug 2014
organize gdoc and hackpad for hackathons
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:441 commits, 3 pushes in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Chris's contributions primarily focused on refining the user interface and functionality of the application. They made several changes to the Jade templates, incorporating features such as support for Google Doc types, URL dispatching, and implementing visual components like a collapsible index and GitHub ribbons. These changes involved updating the UI and adding specific features based on user interaction with the documents displayed. The user also refactored the code to utilize ui-states, and created loading components for the iframes.
organizehackpad
jupyterhub/kubespawner
Mar 2018 - Oct 2019
Kubernetes spawner for JupyterHub
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:17 commits, 5 PRs, 38 comments in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Chris focused on enhancing the `kubespawner` project, primarily contributing to the Kubernetes interaction and JupyterHub integration. Their work involved implementing event handling and progress updates using Kubernetes events, which is crucial for monitoring pod status during the spawning process. They also fixed critical bugs related to handling pending pods and improved the overall stability and user experience, along with implementing infrastructure changes for improved operation.
spawnerjupyterhub-kubernetes-spawnerjupyterkuberneteskubernetes-cluster
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