Dennis Jen
Principal Visualization Engineer
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDennis Jen is a Principal Visualization Engineer with 12+ years of experience building production-grade front ends and data visualizations for research and product teams, now leading visualization efforts at the Broad Institute. He combines deep visualization expertise (D3, VTK, ITK) with full-stack skills in React, Redux, Flask/Django and Python to turn complex scientific and educational data into expressive, usable interfaces. Dennis has repeatedly led small engineering teams and product roadmaps—from edX analytics and Media Cloud to MIT research prototypes—balancing rapid prototyping with rigorous engineering and testing. His background in scientific visualization and image-analysis libraries gives him a unique ability to bridge domain research and practical web products. An active contributor to Open edX, he’s improved instructor dashboards and integrated external analytics, demonstrating a focus on measurable user impact. Based in Cambridge, MA, he pairs aesthetic sensibility with a history of shipping open-source components and cross-disciplinary tools.
12 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science, BS Computer Science at North Carolina State UniversityMS Computer Science, MS Computer Science at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Github Skills (10)
python10
django10
webservice9
feature-management9
backend9
feature-engineering9
data-service9
feature-flags9
flags9
testing8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
openedx/edx-platform
Nov 2014 - Jun 2018
The Open edX LMS & Studio, powering education sites around the world!
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:45 commits, 46 PRs, 75 pushes in 3 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Dennis focused on modifying the instructor dashboard within the Open edX platform. Their work involved feature flagging enrollment counts, removing them from the legacy dashboard and adding them to a new section with a link to an external analytics dashboard. Additionally, the user added tests for the instructor dashboard and refactored some code to improve the quality. The changes indicate a focus on improving the instructor experience and integrating external analytics.
edxlmssitesbackend-serviceopen-edx
mitmedialab/gobo
Nov 2018 - Mar 2020
💭 Gobo: Your social media. Your rules.
Contributions:36 releases, 502 commits, 395 PRs in 1 year 4 months
social-networkreactflaskfacebooksocial-media
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.