Jonathan Helmus
Member Of The Technical Staff at OpenAI
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJonathan Helmus is a Member of the Technical Staff with 16 years of experience building reliable backend systems, packaging tooling, and scientific Python libraries; he currently works at OpenAI after senior roles at Anaconda and Twitter. He combines deep scientific training (PhD in Chemical Physics) with practical engineering, having led performance and build-system work for CPython, conda, and large-scale package distribution. Jonathan is a prolific open-source contributor across high-impact projects like NumPy, scikit-image, xarray and conda, often fixing subtle bugs, improving testing, and adding platform support such as osx-arm64 and RISC-V. He has strong automation and DevOps chops—authoring build recipes, installer tooling, and CI improvements—and experience hardening supply-chain workflows for large monorepos. Colleagues benefit from his blend of research-grade problem solving and pragmatic shipping focus, and he brings an uncommon background of radar and NMR signal-processing research into modern software tooling.
16 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Chemistry, Bachelor of Science (BS), Chemistry at Michigan Technological UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Chemical Physics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Chemical Physics at The Ohio State University
Stackoverflow
36reputation
84reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (55)
data-visualizations10
dependency-management10
unit-testing10
conda-build10
pytest10
python10
package-management10
scripting10
image-processing10
testing10
data-manipulation10
xray10
conda10
data-visualisation10
ipython10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
conda/conda-build
Jun 2014 - Sep 2020
Commands and tools for building conda packages
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Automation EngineerContributions:10 releases, 4 reviews, 183 commits in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Jonathan primarily contributed to the `conda-build` project by fixing bugs, enhancing existing functionality, and improving the build process. Their work included setting permissions for zip file extractions, improving the handling of Python imports in tests, refining the syntax for entry points, and ensuring that the source hash is verified. Additionally, the user addressed issues related to build isolation with pip and contributed to improvements in the indexing process. They also addressed issues related to cross-compiling.
condaconda-buildpackage-management
conda/constructor
Jan 2017 - Jul 2020
tool for creating installers from conda packages
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:18 commits, 12 PRs, 9 pushes in 3 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Jonathan primarily focused on enhancing the functionality of the conda constructor tool. Their contributions involved adding new command-line arguments, such as `--use-conda`, and addressing issues related to package solving. They also implemented file unlinking during prefix replacement to prevent memory mapping errors. Furthermore, the user improved the tool by correcting bugs in the package download process and enabling building for non-native platforms.
conda
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