Jey Kottalam
Co-Founder & CEO at Rarebird
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJey Kottalam is a computer scientist and entrepreneur with 13 years of experience building system software and applied ML at the intersection of theory and production. As Co-Founder & CEO of Taste Institute (creators of Rarebird) and former Principal Consultant, he blends hands-on backend engineering with product leadership to ship performant, scalable systems. His research and engineering tenure at UC Berkeley’s AMPLab and RISELab reflects deep expertise in distributed systems, mathematical optimization, and mechanism design applied to real-world data problems. An active open-source contributor, he has improved high-profile projects like ADAM for genomics and Spark’s build/tests, emphasizing throughput and robustness. Based in San Francisco, he pairs doctoral-level thinking with pragmatic implementation, often tackling subtle performance and concurrency issues that others overlook.
13 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science at WikipediaY Combinator
English, Tamil
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (17)
apache-spark10
python10
scala10
bioinformatics10
genomics10
testing9
java9
javas9
parquet9
data-structures8
build-automation8
data-structure8
spark8
algorithms8
algorithm8
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
mesos/spark
Mar 2013 - Sep 2013
Lightning-fast cluster computing in Java, Scala and Python.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:96 commits in 6 months
Contributions summary:Jey made contributions focused on improving the testing and build processes of the Spark project. They refactored test initialization in streaming modules, bumped the development version, and addressed issues in Python examples. Further contributions included the removal of unnecessary dependencies, code style improvements, and adjustments to the Python daemon and PySpark exception reporting.
pythoncluster-computinglightningsparkscala
bigdatagenomics/adam
Dec 2013 - Apr 2014
ADAM is a genomics analysis platform with specialized file formats built using Apache Avro, Apache Spark, and Apache Parquet. Apache 2 licensed.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:77 commits in 4 months
Contributions summary:Jey primarily contributed to the ADAM genomics analysis platform by implementing and modifying core backend functionalities. Their work involved optimizing the `bam2adam` command for increased throughput and reducing lock contention. They also worked on refactoring and improving the `SnpTable` model and associated code, including fixing a crash in SNP handling. Further, they made improvements to BQSR (Base Quality Score Recalibration), demonstrating a focus on performance and efficiency within the genomics analysis domain.
pythonbioinformaticsadamlicensedbig-data
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