Christopher Hesse
Member Of Technical Staff at OpenAI
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChristopher Hesse is a seasoned software engineer with 15 years of experience building scalable backend systems and developer tools, currently a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI in San Francisco. He co-founded two startups, including Pushbullet where he owned the server backend and API for a product that reached millions of users, demonstrating strong product-to-production experience. His open-source contributions span high-profile ML and RL projects—OpenAI Gym, Procgen, Retro and Baselines—where he improved environment reliability, observability, and performance for reinforcement learning research. He also contributes technical documentation for low-level projects like the Triton compiler and has hands-on ML model work in repos such as pix2pix-tensorflow. Comfortable across C/C++, Python and cloud CI systems, Christopher brings an engineer’s pragmatism: shipping robust systems, improving maintainability, and quietly fixing tricky edge cases that unblock research and production.
15 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science Electrical Engineering, Bachelor of Science Electrical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University
Stackoverflow
1,059reputation
52kreached
54answers
1question
Github Skills (40)
c-language10
dev-environment10
convolutional-neural-networks10
python10
image-processing10
gymnasium10
openai-gym10
machine-learning10
reinforcement-learning10
triton10
deep-learning10
tensorflow10
build-automation10
development-environment10
neural-network10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
openai/procgen
Nov 2019 - Aug 2022
Procgen Benchmark: Procedurally-Generated Game-Like Gym-Environments
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:11 releases, 3 reviews, 116 commits in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Christopher contributed to various aspects of the Procgen benchmark environment, with a strong focus on building and maintaining the core environment library. They implemented features, fixed bugs, and updated dependencies. They also worked on building the project, including integrating continuous integration using GitHub Actions.
gym-environmentsreinforcement-learningbenchmarkprocgengym
openai/retro
Feb 2018 - Dec 2020
Retro Games in Gym
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 138 commits, 43 PRs in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Christopher's contributions primarily involve making enhancements and addressing issues within the gym-retro environment. These changes include modifications to import procedures, such as adding Sega classics, as well as altering maintainer details in the setup file. Furthermore, the user implemented the addition of ram observations and incorporated fixes and changes related to score mechanisms across multiple games. These efforts indicate a focus on improving the functionality and maintainability of the games within the environment.
gamegamesretroreinforcement-learningretro-games
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.