Derrick Bonafilia
Principal Machine Learning Engineer at Overstory
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDerrick Bonafilia is a Principal Machine Learning Engineer based in Boston with a decade of experience building production AI systems that span recommendation engines, multimodal GenAI, and large-scale computer vision pipelines. He has led end-to-end ML efforts at Quizlet—shipping multimodal study experiences and a personalized Home Feed—and driven architecture and MLOps standards across teams. His background includes R&D roles at The New York Times and AI2 where he built OCR/NLP archives and game-playing LLMs (EMNLP spotlight), plus CVPR-published work on remote-sensing flood mapping and satellite imagery. Derrick’s early systems work at Facebook on the Nuclide debugger and internships at Google show a strong foundation in low-level, scalable engineering that complements his model development expertise. He’s comfortable taking projects from research prototypes to production at scale and often bridges gaps between model innovation, infra, and user-facing product needs. Notably, he combines deep academic publications with practical impact—shipping features used by millions while contributing to open-source debugging and tooling.
10 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree Computer Science, Bachelor's degree Computer Science at Williams College
Github Skills (8)
debugging10
lldb10
c-language8
cprogramming-language8
javascript7
react5
fluxor4
flux4
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
facebookarchive/nuclide
Jun 2016 - Aug 2016
An open IDE for web and native mobile development, built on top of Atom
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:34 commits in 2 months
Contributions summary:Derrick primarily contributed to the development of the lldb debugger backend, including adding features for thread management and request switching. Their work involved modifying the server-side scripts and implementing functionality for displaying thread information in the user interface. The user also added settings for single-threaded stepping and made corresponding changes in the PHP and HHVM debugger components. Furthermore, they refactored connection information within the PHP debugger and implemented features for pausing and resuming debugging sessions.
mobile-developmentatomideon-top
dbonafilia/SGDWR-AdamWR-Keras
Mar 2020 - Mar 2020
SGDW/SGDWR and AdamW/AdamWR optimizers for Keras
Contributions:5 pushes in 8 days
deep-learningadamwtensorflowoptimizersadamwr
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