Colin Curtin
Staff Software Engineer at Datavant
Berkeley, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolColin Curtin is a Staff Software Engineer in Berkeley with 16 years of hands-on production experience and eight years of high-level engineering management, known for shipping reliable Ruby and Node.js systems at scale. He excels at turning ambiguous problems into coherent vision, strategy, and execution, often acting as the “glue” that helps teams gel and deliver complex tax, payroll, and payments infrastructure. Deep expertise in PostgreSQL, background job systems (Sidekiq/Gearman), observability, and DevOps complements his architecture work across APIs, ETL pipelines, and data warehouses. Colin has led engineering organizations at Block and Human Interest, architected integration platforms on AWS, and contributed to the Elm compiler as a full-stack developer—demonstrating both language-agnostic craftsmanship and open-source curiosity. He is an advocate for underrepresented voices in tech and brings a research-minded approach with interests in constraint optimization, TLA+, LLMs, and even quantum programming. Notably, his code has powered widely used services—from payroll to grocery delivery—illustrating an ability to impact everyday systems at national scale.
16 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science, BS Computer Science at UC Santa BarbaraDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Memes, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Memes at Raised By The InternetAS Computer Science Acting, AS Computer Science Acting at Santa Barbara City College
Stackoverflow
2,243reputation
479kreached
28answers
4questions
buffer
top-5%
ruby
top-5%
ssl
top-5%
io
top-5%
Github Skills (18)
elm10
compiler-compiler10
compiler10
ssl9
javascript9
json9
ruby9
io9
buffer9
http9
passenger6
shell6
hash6
phusion6
ruby-on-rails6
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
elm/compiler
May 2013 - May 2013
Compiler for Elm, a functional language for reliable webapps.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:8 commits in 3 days
Contributions summary:Colin primarily focused on improving the Elm compiler, addressing both frontend and backend issues. They fixed compilation errors, HTTP/JSON issues, and refactored code. They also made improvements to the codebase by adding whitespace and correcting code style, and addressed documentation and spelling errors within the Elm libraries.
compilerelm
perplexes/valor
Mar 2010 - Oct 2020
A recreation of Subspace/Continuum in Node.js/coffeescript
Contributions:175 commits, 6 PRs, 11 pushes in 10 years 9 months
nodejs
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