Kuan Butts
Staff Software Engineer at Mapbox
Oakland, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKuan Butts is a Staff Software Engineer in Oakland with 12 years building large-scale, low-latency distributed systems for real-time telemetry, mobility, and mapping products. At Mapbox he engineered global inference pipelines that process billions of observations per hour and materially improved ETA precision, recall, and coverage through probe-matching and modality classification work. His background blends transportation research (MIT) and practical city-focused engineering—delivering spatial analytics, national-scale data ingestion, and production ML for routing and mobility insights. A pragmatic designer who prioritizes operational hygiene and readable code, he also contributes to notable open-source geospatial tooling like OSMnx, where he improved error handling and maintainability. He’s equally comfortable defining engineering hiring rubrics and candidate archetypes as he is optimizing high-throughput pipelines, reflecting a mix of technical depth and product-minded systems thinking.
12 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Master's Degree City Planning (Transportation Systems Planning), Master's Degree City Planning (Transportation Systems Planning) at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyBS Architecture Architecture Urban Planning Focus, BS Architecture Architecture Urban Planning Focus at Washington University in St. LouisSoftware, Software at Recurse Center
English
Stackoverflow
1,668reputation
146kreached
11answers
53questions
Github Skills (14)
error-handling10
refactoring10
gis10
geospatial10
python10
refactor10
http6
pandas6
ssl6
nodejs6
javascript6
amazon-ec26
knexjs6
dask6
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
gboeing/osmnx
Feb 2018 - Sep 2019
Python package to easily download, model, analyze, and visualize street networks and other geospatial features from OpenStreetMap.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 3 PRs, 29 comments in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Kuan primarily focused on refactoring and improving error handling within the osmnx library. They modified existing functions by making arguments positional, implemented custom error messages for better clarity, and replaced existing error types with more specific ones. These changes focused on improving code maintainability and user experience by providing informative error messages.
nominatimpythonspatialvisualizemap-matching
kuanb/z100-preserved
Mar 2019 - Apr 2021
Contributions:13 commits, 11 pushes, 2 branches in 2 years
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