Donghee Na - Lead ML Infrastructure Software Development Engineer at Python Software Foundation

Donghee Na

Lead ML Infrastructure Software Development Engineer at Python Software Foundation

Seoul, South Korea

Join Prog.AI to see contacts

Summary

🤩

Rockstar

🎓

Top School

Donghee Na is a Lead ML Infrastructure Software Development Engineer based in Seoul with 12 years of experience building scalable, production-grade backend systems and ML platforms. A long-time CPython core developer and 2025 Python Steering Council member, he brings deep language-level expertise from contributions across CPython, RustPython and Go-based Python interpreters. He has driven large-scale backend work at Karrot, LINE and Kakao—optimizing databases, designing cross-language interfaces and migrating critical data pipelines—while also contributing to notable open-source projects like coala and pyperf. Comfortable across languages and runtimes, Donghee frequently tackles low-level correctness and performance issues (memory leaks, interpreter builtins, locale and encoding edge cases) that most engineers don’t see. He pairs leadership in infrastructure delivery with hands-on craftsmanship in language internals, making him particularly effective at productionizing ML tooling.

12 years of coding experience

7 years of employment as a software developer

Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Computer Science and Engineering, Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Computer Science and Engineering at Chungnam National University

Github Skills (37)

cpython10

debugging10

debug10

benchmark10

strings10

lib10

python10

text-manipulation10

testing10

benchmarking10

c-programming10

interpreter10

cffi10

standard-library10

lang10

Programming languages (15)

JavaC++CSSCRustMakefileGoHTML

Github contributions (5)

google/grumpy

Feb 2017 - Nov 2017

Grumpy is a Python to Go source code transcompiler and runtime.

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:18 commits, 22 PRs, 87 comments in 9 months

Contributions summary:Donghee implemented new functionalities within the Grumpy Python-to-Go transcompiler and runtime environment. These contributions included the implementation of Python string methods like `swapcase()`, `isalpha()`, `isdigit()`, `isspace()`, `isupper()`, `islower()`, `istitle()`, and added support for the `ellipsis` type. The user also refactored the print function to utilize *grumpy.File and incorporated the raw_input function. Finally, the user added the float and complex hash function.

golangpythonruntimetranscompilergo-source

python/cpython

Apr 2017 - Jan 2023

The Python programming language

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:1575 reviews, 74 commits, 1387 PRs in 5 years 9 months

Contributions summary:Donghee primarily contributed to the Python standard library (cpython repository), addressing bugs and implementing optimizations related to core functionalities. Their commits focused on improving performance and resolving issues within the `_decimal`, `_json`, `_sqlite`, `_weakref`, `_bisect`, `_operator`, `_lzma`, and `_xmlrpc` modules. The user's work also included fixing memory leaks, correcting error messages, enhancing documentation, and adding new features to the library.

python-programmingprogramming-languagepythonpython-programming-language

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.

Request Free Trial