Daniel Sparks
Vice President at PDT Partners
New York, New York, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDaniel Sparks is a vice president and former mathematician with 12 years of experience building safety-critical AI and motion-planning systems, now leading quantitative software work in New York. He moved from academic math (ABD at UC Berkeley) into hands-on engineering at Clever and Google, then spent six transformative years at Waymo designing cost functions, safety scoring, and planner reasoning for lane changes and merges. Daniel combines deep theoretical training with practical systems experience—shipping robust distributed services, search-focused ML, and real-time autonomous vehicle software. Known for translating rigorous math into production-grade algorithms, he favors measurable safety outcomes and pragmatic engineering tradeoffs.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D. candidate (ABD) Mathematics, Ph.D. candidate (ABD) Mathematics at University of California, Berkeley
Stackoverflow
67reputation
0reached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (37)
python-bindings9
visual-studio8
typescript8
vscode8
vscode-extension8
visual-studio-code8
microsoft7
electron7
editor7
api7
keybindings7
chess-engine7
cmd6
vim6
windows6
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
d-sparks/gravy
Oct 2019 - Jan 2023
Contributions:24 PRs, 84 pushes, 20 branches in 3 years 3 months
d-sparks/exacto
Jul 2014 - Mar 2021
Contributions:1 release, 181 commits, 3 PRs in 6 years 8 months
chess-enginepythonmachine-learning
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