Michael Chirico
Senior Data Scientist
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Chirico is a Senior Data Scientist with 11 years of experience blending rigorous economics training (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) with hands-on ML and data engineering at Google and Grab. He builds reliable production analytics and modeling pipelines while maintaining a strong emphasis on testability and tooling—evident from sustained open-source contributions to high-profile R projects like data.table, ggplot2, and testthat. Comfortable in both research and product environments, he translates complex causal and statistical problems into robust, production-ready solutions. His background in math and economics plus a Data Incubator data science credential underpin a pragmatic, metrics-driven approach to problem solving. A less obvious strength is his long-term focus on QA and test automation across scientific codebases, improving reproducibility and developer velocity in popular statistical libraries. Based in San Francisco, he combines academic depth with large-scale industry impact.
11 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
N/A, Mathematics & Economics, N/A, Mathematics & Economics at Drexel UniversityData Science, Data Science at The Data IncubatorDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Economics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Economics at University of Pennsylvania
Japanese, Spanish, German, Chinese, English
Stackoverflow
34,285reputation
4.6mreached
645answers
169questions
dataframe
top-5%
package
top-5%
substring
top-5%
sorting
top-5%
regex
top-5%
r
top-1%
Github Skills (48)
unit-testing10
data-visualizations10
visualization10
r-package10
r10
package-development10
testing10
data-visualisation10
c1110
testthat10
functional-design10
c1710
code-analysis10
snapshot-testing10
data-visualization10
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
r-lib/lintr
Sep 2020 - Dec 2022
Static Code Analysis for R
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & R Package Maintainer
Back-end Developer & R Package MaintainerContributions:4 releases, 2539 reviews, 531 commits in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Michael made several contributions to the `lintr` R package, primarily focused on enhancing the code analysis capabilities. They addressed issues related to incomplete or incorrect exclusion specifications and introduced improvements to existing linters, such as the `equals_na_linter` and `unneeded_concatenation_linter`. These contributions involved modifying and extending core linter logic and adding test cases to ensure robustness. Furthermore, the user has also contributed to documentation improvements.
rstatic-code-analysislinter
Rdatatable/data.table
Sep 2015 - Dec 2022
R's data.table package extends data.frame:
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2187 reviews, 322 commits, 1374 PRs in 7 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the data.table package by fixing bugs and adding new features. The commits demonstrate a focus on enhancing existing functions such as `setDF`, `.GRP`, `.BY`, `print.data.table`, `setDT`, `dcast`, and `fwrite` by adding arguments, fixing logic errors, handling edge cases and improving code clarity. Additionally, there's evidence of refactoring in the form of converting vignettes and porting the `CJ` function to C, indicating a focus on improving the package's performance and usability.
r-packageframecranrrstats
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