James Kahn
Principal Software Engineer at Hal Systems
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Kahn is a Principal Software Engineer based in Melbourne with 11 years of experience blending ML, HPC, and grid computing across clean energy and high-energy physics. Trained as a particle physicist (PhD, LMU Munich), he transitioned to AI consulting in Germany where he led 17 projects, invented three open-source PyTorch tools, and secured €100k as PI for smart-grid research. He combines hands-on model development on supercomputers with systems-level work—having administered 30k+ CPU cores, petabytes of storage, and integrated V100 GPUs into production clusters. Known for mentoring researchers and building teams, he has supervised multiple student projects that evolved into PhDs and published leading AI-in-energy research. Comfortable working independently or as a collaborative problem-solver, he brings a physicist’s knack for abstraction to pragmatic engineering and reproducible software. Anecdotally, his GitHub quip—“50% fact, 50% magic, 100% RuntimeError: CUDA out of memory”—captures both his technical depth and wry sense of engineering realism.
10 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Physics, Magna cum laude, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Physics, Magna cum laude at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität MünchenThe University of Melbourne
Github Skills (26)
nem10
jekyll10
jekyll-theme10
energy9
beamer9
responsive9
github-pages9
latex8
file-management8
slide7
vim-plugin7
file-manager7
data-access6
vim6
neovim5
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
Helmholtz-AI-Energy/BaumBauen
Aug 2022 - Oct 2022
Contributions:28 commits, 19 pushes, 1 branch in 2 months
kahn-jms/vim_config
Mar 2016 - Dec 2022
Contributions:34 commits, 28 pushes, 1 branch in 6 years 10 months
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