Daniel Hiltgen
Software Engineer at Ollama
Los Altos, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDaniel Hiltgen is a seasoned software engineer with 11 years of experience building resilient back-end systems and DevOps tooling from Silicon Valley to enterprise datacenters. Currently at Ollama, he contributes to LLM infrastructure and cross-platform build support, bringing practical expertise in CPU/ROCm builds and cgo integrations for llama.cpp. His career includes senior technical leadership roles at VMware, Docker, and Carbon Black, where he led large teams, shipped core virtualization and container platform features, and prototyped Kubernetes integration for Docker. As a former CTO and co-founder, he designed distributed cloud and secure overlay networking systems, pairing low-level kernel and storage work with high-level orchestration. Known for tackling complex build, dependency, and platform portability challenges, he blends hands-on systems programming with strategic architectural vision.
11 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Github Skills (11)
c1710
error-handling10
cgo10
build-system10
go10
c1110
devops9
cprogramming-language9
roc9
c-language9
cuda9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
ollama/ollama
Sep 2023 - Mar 2025
Get up and running with Llama 3.3, DeepSeek-R1, Phi-4, Gemma 3, and other large language models.
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:505 reviews, 819 PRs, 450 pushes in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Daniel primarily contributed to the back-end infrastructure of the project. Their work involved implementing error handling for downloads and adding support for cgo implementations of llama.cpp. They also refined build processes and dependency management, improving the ability to build CPU-only versions. Furthermore, they integrated a ROCM build and expanded the build platform support.
deepseekgemmagemma2gemma3go
dhiltgen/docker-machine-kvm
Sep 2015 - Apr 2017
KVM driver for docker-machine
Contributions:12 releases, 9 commits, 11 PRs in 1 year 7 months
kvmdocker-machinelibvirtdockerminikube
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