Christian Buck
Staff Software Engineer at Google DeepMind
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolChristian Buck is a Staff Software Engineer at Google DeepMind with 16 years of experience specializing in machine translation, NLP, and machine learning, including reinforcement learning and quality estimation. He progressed from PhD research on confidence estimation for statistical MT at the University of Edinburgh to senior engineering roles at Google, now driving research-to-production at DeepMind in Zurich. Christian combines deep research instincts with production-grade engineering: his open-source contributions to cornerstone MT projects like Moses and the widely used fast_align show tangible improvements in performance, multithreading, and robustness. He has a strong systems mindset—optimizing algorithms, implementing thread-safe caches, and refactoring for efficiency—while keeping an eye on model uncertainty and quality signals. A mathematician by training and experienced in both academia and industry, he brings rigorous quantitative thinking to large-scale ML systems. Unexpectedly, his early freelance data-analytics work and hands-on fixes in legacy C++ MT code reveal a practical, detail-oriented approach to solving real-world NLP problems.
16 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Diploma, Computer science, Diploma, Computer science at RWTH Aachen UniversityMathematics, Mathematics at Lund UniversityDiploma in Computer Science, Computer science, Diploma in Computer Science, Computer science at Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen
German, English
Stackoverflow
103reputation
10kreached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (14)
algorithms10
openmp10
machine-translation10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
multithreading10
caching8
natural-language-processing8
data-structure7
data-structures7
algorithm7
buffering6
python6
subprocess6
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
clab/fast_align
May 2015 - May 2016
Simple, fast unsupervised word aligner
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 1 PR, 1 comment in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Christian significantly improved the performance and functionality of the unsupervised word aligner. They implemented OpenMP multithreading for parallel processing, increasing the speed of the alignment process. The user also refactored code to use more efficient data structures and corrected issues related to multithreading. In addition, they optimized the initial data processing and made adjustments to the algorithm to handle edge cases, ultimately improving the accuracy of the alignment.
unsupervisedaligner
moses-smt/mosesdecoder
Feb 2012 - Feb 2014
Moses, the machine translation system
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:56 commits in 2 years
Contributions summary:Christian primarily contributed to the `GlobalLexicalModel` and `TranslationSystem` components of the Moses machine translation system. Their work included fixing compilation errors related to `size_t` and adding thread-safe caching to `GlobalLexiconModel` for improved performance. They also made several cleanup commits, indicating a focus on code quality and maintainability within the core translation system logic.
i18nmachine-translationtranslationlocalizationmoses
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