Michael Sarahan
Senior Build Engineer at NVIDIA
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Sarahan is a Senior Build Engineer with 15 years of experience making complex software reliably build and run for data scientists and researchers. He has deep expertise in package and installer tooling—contributing to foundational projects like conda, conda-forge, constructor, and scikit-build—and has led build automation, cross-compilation, and CI/CD integrations at Anaconda, Posit/RStudio, and now NVIDIA. Comfortable in both Python and C/C++ ecosystems, he pairs low-level platform fixes (Windows installer edge cases, shell hooks) with high-level documentation and governance work that helps open-source communities scale. He’s repeatedly improved reproducible builds and Docker-based build environments, and his contributions to conda-smithy and conda-recipes show a knack for smoothing multi-platform release workflows. Former roles in scientific software and microscopy gave him hands-on systems and instrumentation experience, so he often bridges hardware-timed constraints with maintainable software practices. Pragmatic and community-minded, he prioritizes maintainability and collaboration, quietly improving developer experience across widely used tooling.
15 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Materials Science, PhD, Materials Science at University of California, DavisBS, Chemistry, BS, Chemistry at Texas A&M University
Stackoverflow
1,081reputation
260kreached
29answers
7questions
anaconda
top-5%
Github Skills (72)
package-management10
python10
image-processing10
command-line-interface10
bash10
cmake10
parallel-computing10
ci-cd-pipeline10
build-automation10
governance10
installers10
conda-forge10
linux10
dockers10
doc10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
anaconda/docker-images
Jan 2016 - Oct 2019
Repository of Docker images created by Anaconda
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:64 commits, 21 PRs, 19 pushes in 3 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily focused on building and configuring a Docker-based build environment for the Anaconda project. They implemented and refined scripts for setting up the environment, including user configuration, and the import of user-specific settings. The user also worked on streamlining the image build process, adding features such as C++ ABI selection, and optimizing for 32-bit builds. Their work demonstrates a strong understanding of Docker and shell scripting for automated build systems.
containersanalyticscontinuumdocker-imagedocker
conda/conda-docs
Sep 2015 - Aug 2019
Conda documentation
Role in this project:Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:93 commits, 67 PRs, 219 pushes in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Michael's contributions primarily focused on updating and expanding the conda documentation. They added detailed explanations of environment variables used in the conda build process, including Mercurial and Git variables, and also documented the use of build variants. The user made significant revisions to the documentation, introducing new concepts, correcting errors, and clarifying existing information. These efforts focused on the meta.yaml file and its usages.
condadocumentation-site
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