Denny Lee
Principal Developer Advocate
Kirkland, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDenny Lee is a Principal Developer Advocate at Databricks with 13+ years building internet-scale distributed systems, data platforms, and AI/ML pipelines. A long-time Apache Spark and MLflow contributor and Delta Lake/Unity Catalog maintainer, he blends deep engineering with developer advocacy to help organizations operationalize lakehouse architectures. His background includes leadership and hands-on roles at Microsoft (Azure Cosmos DB, HDInsight, SQL Server) and as Senior Director of Data Sciences Engineering at Concur, giving him rare cross-domain expertise in BI, big data, and production ML. He holds a Masters in Biomedical Informatics and has applied data engineering and genomics workflows to healthcare customers, reflecting a strong applied science bent. Active on GitHub, he’s contributed practical MLflow tutorials and Databricks Delta Live Tables examples that simplify end-to-end data ingestion and model workflows. Based in Kirkland, WA, he pairs technical depth in distributed systems and AI with an engineer’s curiosity—mountain climber, frisbee fan, and occasional cyclist.
13 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Biostatistics, Biostatistics at University of WashingtonMasters Biomedical Informatics, Masters Biomedical Informatics at Oregon Health & Science UniversityPrince of WalesBSc Physiology, BSc Physiology at McGill University
Chinese, French
Stackoverflow
3,224reputation
441kreached
78answers
2questions
apache-spark
top-5%
Github Skills (23)
spark10
delta-lake10
data-pipelines10
python10
scikit10
databricks10
machine-learning10
mlflow10
model-management10
scala10
etl10
scikit-learn10
data-pipeline10
pandas9
apache-spark9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
databricks/delta-live-tables-notebooks
May 2021 - Jun 2021
Role in this project:
Data Engineer
Data EngineerContributions:1 review, 54 commits, 29 PRs in 1 month
Contributions summary:Denny primarily contributed to building and maintaining data pipelines within a Databricks environment, as indicated by the code modifications. They focused on correcting table names, fixing naming bugs, and integrating different data processing examples using Scala and Python. The user also demonstrated experience in data ingestion, transformation, and the creation of various data tables (bronze, silver, and gold) for data analysis and ML tasks.
mlflow/mlflow
Jun 2018 - May 2021
Open source platform for the machine learning lifecycle
Role in this project:ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:20 commits, 11 PRs, 11 comments in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Denny primarily contributed to the development of machine learning models within the MLflow framework. Their work involved creating a tutorial for training an ElasticNet model on the diabetes dataset, including code for generating and logging plots. They also added a Jupyter notebook version of a tutorial and simplified the diabetes example. Additionally, they updated a multistep workflow example and corrected a spelling error in the documentation.
pythonlifecyclemlmachine-learningincremental-learning
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