Kurt Smith
Senior Machine Learning Engineer at The SSI Group, LLC
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKurt Smith is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer with 16 years of industry experience and a PhD in plasma physics, blending deep scientific rigor with hands-on production ML and engineering. He has led data science teams and green-field initiatives across domains from wearable health and travel to oil & gas and energy grid, delivering measurable business impact including over $10M in annualized revenue at Vrbo. Comfortable from research to production, Kurt combines Bayesian and hierarchical modeling, optimization, and scalable PyData/PyTorch stacks with pragmatic product-focused iteration and stakeholder alignment. He’s contributed to well-known open-source projects in the PyData ecosystem (Blaze/odo), improving performance and CSV/URL data handling—evidence of his attention to robustness and real-world data pipelines. Known for staged, risk-aware development, he frequently bridges domain experts and engineers to translate complex data into actionable insights. Based in Austin, he also authors technical work, including an O’Reilly book on Python compilation and optimization.
16 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D. Plasma Physics, Ph.D. Plasma Physics at University of Wisconsin-MadisonBachelor of Science - BS Applied Mathematics Physics, Bachelor of Science - BS Applied Mathematics Physics at The University of Dallas
Github Skills (14)
pandas10
data-migration10
csv10
sql10
python10
data-analysis9
sqlalchemy9
performance-optimization9
strings8
text-manipulation8
testing8
dataframe7
dataframes7
documentation6
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
blaze/blaze
Sep 2015 - Nov 2016
NumPy and Pandas interface to Big Data
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Data Scientist
Back-end Developer & Data ScientistContributions:3 releases, 291 commits, 132 PRs in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Kurt primarily contributed to improving the Blaze codebase by addressing performance and usability issues. They fixed a bug related to unnecessary computation when stringifying tuples of expressions and added a regression test to prevent recurrence. They also optimized the performance of join expressions by memoizing the schema property and expanded the functionality with methods such as `str_upper` and `str_lower`. The user also worked on enhancements that supported URL resources and CSV URLs.
data-analysispythondata-sciencenumpymachine-learning
blaze/odo
Oct 2015 - Sep 2016
Data Migration for the Blaze Project
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 74 commits, 53 PRs in 10 months
Contributions summary:Kurt primarily contributed to the `odo` project's back-end functionality, specifically focusing on improving CSV datetime coercion performance and addressing related issues. They implemented fixes and optimizations for data migration, particularly within the pandas backend. The user also addressed bugs and improved code related to the project's documentation and testing infrastructure.
data-migrationmigrationblaze
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