Kastan Day
Senior Software Engineer - HPC AI & Data
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKastan Day is a Senior Software Engineer specializing in HPC, AI, and distributed machine learning with nine years of experience building scalable systems for scientific and industrial workloads. Based in Seattle, he has led teams and engineered solutions that run petabytes of data across hundreds of GPUs and 200-gig networks, with notable work in distributed training and inference for climate and physical simulation. His background spans research and industry—contributions at NCSA, IBM Research, and Rescale—where he blends model design with low-level systems engineering to optimize parallelism, networking, and memory bandwidth. A founder-turned-researcher, he also shipped wearable-driven health products and produced high-impact robotics and vision prototypes at NASA, showing a pattern of translating research into production. Beyond code, he’s an outdoors enthusiast who focuses on parallel and distributed ML tooling (see github.com/kday-rescale), and he emphasizes scientific rigor by supervising processes rather than outcomes.
9 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's of Arts Computer Science & Cognitive Science, Bachelor's of Arts Computer Science & Cognitive Science at Swarthmore CollegeCardigan Mountain SchoolMaster of Science - MS Computer Science, Master of Science - MS Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignHigh school, High school at Phillips Academy
Github Skills (200)
hyperparameter-optimization10
foundation-models10
nlp10
llama10
matching10
llm10
python10
tensorflow10
machine-learning10
large-language-models10
scaling10
gemma10
ray10
optimization10
mistral10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
likeaj6/FakeBananas
Sep 2017 - Nov 2019
Fake news detection web app. Fake Bananas finished top 10 at HackMIT 2017 and won awards for 'best use of data' and 'best use of machine learning for the common good.' (Project is no longer maintained)
Contributions:64 commits, 49 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 1 month
pythonfake-news-detectionhackmitflaskbananas
Center-for-AI-Innovation/ai-ta-backend
May 2023 - Apr 2025
API backend for UIUC AI Teaching Assistant.
Contributions:121 reviews, 175 PRs, 838 pushes in 1 year 10 months
aichatbotllm
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