David Watkins
Senior Machine Learning Engineer at U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)
California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDavid Watkins is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer with a decade of experience building data and ML systems, currently leading ML efforts at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Water Mission Area. He has a strong track record deploying cloud-native pipelines and inference systems on AWS—spearheading the agency’s first SageMaker-centric workflows and an AWS pilot that accelerated critical-mineral assessment by ~100x for a DARPA-funded effort. Comfortable bridging research and operations, he has led small teams, taught intensive R training courses, and authored widely used R packages with robust testing. His background in geophysics and applied research informs pragmatic solutions for environmental forecasting, including streamflow drought tools delivering public-facing forecasts. Colleagues rely on him to standardize compute environments and cost controls while moving models from prototype to production.
10 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (M.S.), Geophysics, Master of Science (M.S.), Geophysics at University of Wisconsin-MadisonBachelor of Science (B.S.), Geology, minor in Mathematics, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Geology, minor in Mathematics at Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Github Skills (141)
metadata10
hydrology10
overlap10
sample-data10
government-data10
r10
water10
googleauthr10
points10
r-package10
carbon-emissions10
portal10
google-analytics-api10
geo10
climate-change10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
wdwatkins/geoknife
Oct 2016 - Dec 2021
R tools for geo-web processing of gridded data via the Geo Data Portal. geoknife slices up gridded data according to overlap with irregular features, such as watersheds, lakes, points, etc.
Contributions:63 pushes, 5 branches in 5 years 2 months
r-packagegeorstatsdata-portalportal
wdwatkins/hurricane-irma
Sep 2017 - Sep 2017
Contributions:53 pushes, 1 branch in 7 days
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