Dave Decaprio
President, COO, & Board Member at Firefly Neuroscience
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDave Decaprio is a veteran technology leader and operator with over two decades of experience translating cutting‑edge research into commercial products across genomics, healthcare, finance, logistics, and media. He has founded and led multiple startups (including ClosedLoop and Cizr), served as CTO and VP of engineering, and today serves as President and COO of Firefly Neuroscience while based in Austin. At the Broad Institute he helped map biology to the Human Genome Project, and later led GNS Healthcare’s first causal ML platform—demonstrating a rare ability to bridge deep science and production-grade software. An engineer at heart, he has also contributed performance-critical fixes to major open-source projects like Apache Spark, optimizing cache locking for better scalability. Known for rapidly assembling teams and shipping high-impact launches (e.g., a 13-week NFL launch at Bluefin Labs), he combines academic rigor from an MIT EECS degree with hands-on systems expertise and operator-level execution.
13 years of coding experience
30 years of employment as a software developer
B.S. 6-1 (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science), B.S. 6-1 (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Stackoverflow
2,091reputation
127kreached
32answers
24questions
tensorflow
top-5%
scipy
top-5%
Github Skills (21)
spark10
locking10
big-data10
java10
scala10
javas10
performance-optimization10
locks10
scipy9
tensorflow9
concurrency9
sql8
sparse-matrix6
pyspark6
python6
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
apache/spark
Jan 2017 - Jun 2020
Apache Spark - A unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 PRs, 60 comments in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Dave primarily focused on optimizing the Apache Spark's CacheManager, a core component for caching data within the Spark engine. Their contributions involved identifying and resolving locking issues within the CacheManager, specifically addressing inefficiencies that caused performance bottlenecks during query optimization and recaching operations. These changes aimed to minimize lock contention and improve the overall performance and scalability of the Spark system. The work encompassed refactoring the CacheManager logic and reducing the time locks were held.
apache-sparkpythonscalarjava
closedloop-ai/cv19index
Mar 2020 - Apr 2020
COVID-19 Vulnerability Index
Contributions:6 releases, 51 commits, 24 PRs in 1 month
vulnerabilityxgboost-modelml
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