James Pivarski
Computational Physicist
Oak Park, Illinois, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Pivarski is a computational physicist with 13 years of experience applying data-driven techniques to answer quantitative questions and inventing tools that simplify analysis workflows. Based at Princeton after prior roles in industry and academia, he blends deep physics training (PhD Cornell, BS Carnegie Mellon) with practical software engineering and QA expertise. He contributes to prominent open-source scientific projects—improving Awkward Array’s performance and JSON handling and hardening Numba’s numerical test suite—demonstrating a focus on robust, high-performance data tooling. Known for bridging research and production, he often combines technical writing, test automation, and backend fixes to make complex data pipelines more maintainable and faster.
13 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Physics, PhD, Physics at Cornell UniversityBS, Physics, BS, Physics at Carnegie Mellon University
French, English
Github Skills (11)
numpy10
json10
numba10
python10
documentation10
test-automation10
testing10
vectorization9
performance-optimization9
compiler-compiler9
compiler9
Programming languages (26)
Github contributions (5)
scikit-hep/awkward
Aug 2019 - Jan 2023
Manipulate JSON-like data with NumPy-like idioms.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer and Technical Writer
Back-end Developer and Technical WriterContributions:264 releases, 1553 reviews, 997 commits in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:James's contributions primarily focused on enhancing the documentation and improving the core functionalities of the Awkward Array library. The user implemented improvements by adding new test samples. Their work also involved bug fixes and a rewrite to address performance issues. The user was also responsible for improving the JSON features of the program.
columnar-formatdata-analysispythonjson-liketuple
numba/numba
Feb 2020 - Feb 2020
NumPy aware dynamic Python compiler using LLVM
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:1 review, 2 commits, 1 PR in 1 day
Contributions summary:James primarily contributes to testing and quality assurance within the Numba project. Their commits include adding new tests for the vectorized functions and the NEP-13 functionality, demonstrating a focus on ensuring the correctness and reliability of Numba's numerical computation features. They also refactor the test code by switching from the `assert` statement to `unittest`'s `assert*` methods, which is a clear indication of working on test automation practices. The contributions help to improve the quality and maintainability of the testing framework.
cudapythonparallelnumpynumba
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