Daniel D'avella
Principal Engineer at Pixee
Washington DC-Baltimore Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDaniel D'avella is a Principal Engineer with 11 years of experience leading cross-disciplinary teams and shipping robust backend systems from the Department of Defense to security startups and scientific institutions. He combines deep systems and performance work (including FPGA/GPU and embedded systems) with modern cloud and application security engineering, most recently driving instrumentation and vulnerability-detection features at Contrast Security and platform-level engineering at Pixee. A seasoned Python polyglot, he has contributed to high-profile open-source projects in astronomy and space science—including astropy and the James Webb Space Telescope jwst library—improving test coverage, compression handling, and schema compatibility. Daniel pairs hands-on implementation and QA rigor with product-minded leadership, and his background in linguistics plus an MS in Computer Science gives him a rare mix of communication, research, and technical synthesis skills.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Johns Hopkins UniversityBachelor's degree, Linguistics, Bachelor's degree, Linguistics at University of Maryland
Github Skills (19)
visualization10
asdf10
pytest10
qt10
python10
testing10
data-modeling10
schema-design10
fits10
astropy10
fileio10
file-processing10
file-handling10
file-access10
visualizations10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
astropy/astropy
Jul 2017 - Mar 2019
Astronomy and astrophysics core library
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & QA Engineer
Backend Developer & QA EngineerContributions:265 commits, 94 PRs, 17 pushes in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Daniel primarily focused on improving the test suite for the astropy/astropy repository. They implemented tests for opening FITS files from URLs and file handles, which included handling compression. They addressed several bugs within the existing tests, improving their robustness and reliability. Furthermore, the user contributed to the core functionality by fixing the test suite for parallel runs and by implementing changes for handling and detecting compression in FITS files.
core-librarypythonastronomyscienceastrophysics
spacetelescope/jwst
Jun 2017 - Mar 2019
processing pipeline for James Webb Space Telescope imagery and spectroscopy
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:48 commits, 19 PRs, 95 comments in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Daniel primarily contributed to the `jwst` Python library, focusing on data model and schema-related improvements. Their work involved fixing issues with ASDF schema handling, including resolving combiners and updating to reflect changes in ASDF and Astropy libraries. Additionally, the user addressed compatibility issues and deprecated usages of ASDF functions. These changes indicate a focus on maintaining and improving the core data processing and file format handling capabilities of the library.
python-librarypythonsciencewebbjwst
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