Jes Ford
Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Modeling) at Block
South Lake Tahoe, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJes Ford is a Staff Machine Learning Engineer with 11 years of experience applying ML to product-focused problems, currently leading modeling efforts at Block. With a PhD in Physics and a background in astrophysics research, Jes blends rigorous probabilistic modeling and uncertainty quantification with pragmatic productionization—previously shipping NLP systems for Cash App and deep-learning pipelines for drug discovery at Recursion. They have a track record of introducing reproducible software practices, building cloud-backed model registries, and improving data quality to enable cross-team model comparisons. A regular conference speaker and open-source author, Jes is as comfortable presenting at PyCon as designing active learning strategies or Bayesian MCMC workflows. Based in South Lake Tahoe, they bring a scientist’s curiosity to product engineering, often surfacing interpretable model insights (saliency, GradCAM) that bridge ML and domain stakeholders.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Physics & Astronomy, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Physics & Astronomy at The University of British ColumbiaBachelor of Science (B.Sc.), Physics (Math minor), Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.), Physics (Math minor) at University of Nevada, Reno
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (98)
python10
lda10
fasttext10
deep-learning10
glove10
word2vec10
corpus10
topic-modeling10
latent-dirichlet-allocation10
gensim10
word-embeddings10
machine-learning10
neural-network9
galaxy9
nlp9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
jesford/PyTrends-Demo
Oct 2017 - Apr 2022
Contributions:7 pushes, 3 branches in 4 years 5 months
jesford/paper-on-cluster-lensing
Mar 2016 - Aug 2016
Contributions:5 PRs, 133 pushes, 8 branches in 4 months
clusterin-progress
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.