Derek Ma
Data Engineer
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDerek Ma is a data engineer with a decade of experience who blends rigorous academic training (M.S. in Computer Science from UC San Diego, 4.0 GPA) with hands-on production work at Meta and internships across Qualcomm, Kneron, and other engineering teams. He builds and scales data pipelines and warehouses—having implemented Snowflake and Informatica IICS solutions that processed hundreds of millions of records and automated high-throughput ETL—while also contributing to data quality as a QA/test automation engineer on the widely used pandas library. Derek pairs applied machine learning and computer vision experience with practical ops skills (Delta tables, PySpark, DVC, GitLab CI) and entrepreneurial drive demonstrated by founding a scheduling startup integrating Stripe and AWS. He’s currently focused on computational methods for imperfect-information games using heuristics and reinforcement learning, bringing both research curiosity and production-grade engineering to data-driven problems.
10 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree, Computer Science, 4.00/4.00, Master's degree, Computer Science, 4.00/4.00 at University of California, San Diego - Jacobs School of EngineeringHigh School Diploma, 4.5/4.0 (Weighted), High School Diploma, 4.5/4.0 (Weighted) at Canyon Crest Academy
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (7)
pandas10
pytest10
python10
testing10
data-analysis9
text-align7
text-alignment7
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
pandas-dev/pandas
Mar 2020 - Mar 2020
Flexible and powerful data analysis / manipulation library for Python, providing labeled data structures similar to R data.frame objects, statistical functions, and much more
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:7 commits, 9 PRs, 12 comments in 14 days
Contributions summary:Derek's contributions primarily involve modifying existing tests within the pandas library. Their work focused on improving test coverage and addressing potential errors in various modules. The commits demonstrate a focus on correcting test cases and updating test setup to avoid bare `pytest.raises` usage. The changes span a range of areas, including dtypes, frame, and indexing tests, indicating a broad understanding of the library's functionality.
pythondatalabeled-datamanipulationdataframes
Vlek/vlek.github.io
May 2022 - Dec 2022
Personal blog
Contributions:7 commits, 2 PRs, 15 pushes in 7 months
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