Neil Conway
Principal Consulting Engineer at Unaffiliated
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNeil Conway is a Principal Consulting Engineer based in Montreal with 17 years of hands-on experience building large-scale data, AI, and distributed systems and over 20 years working at their intersection. He co-founded Determined AI and led its engineering through an acquisition by HPE, then continued as Senior Director shaping an open-source ML platform for distributed training and experiment management. His background spans deep systems work—from committing to PostgreSQL and Apache Mesos (modernizing concurrency with std::atomic) to production ML infrastructure—blending research-caliber rigor (UC Berkeley PhD) with pragmatic product delivery. As a freelancer and advisor he pairs architectural leadership with code-level contributions across backend, telemetry, and UI, and he’s comfortable moving between low-level concurrency fixes and platform-level design. An investor and startup advisor, he brings a rare mix of academic depth, open-source stewardship, and operator experience shipping scalable AI tooling.
17 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Computer Science, PhD, Computer Science at University of California, BerkeleyBachelor of Science (B.Sc.), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.), Computer Science at Queen's University
Stackoverflow
398reputation
5kreached
12answers
0questions
Github Skills (26)
c-language10
thread-safety10
architecture10
memory-management10
system-design10
go10
cprogramming-language10
architectures10
concurrency10
mesos9
telemetry9
logging8
multithreading8
distributed-systems8
documentation7
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
determined-ai/determined
Apr 2020 - Jul 2022
Determined is an open-source machine learning platform that simplifies distributed training, hyperparameter tuning, experiment tracking, and resource management. Works with PyTorch and TensorFlow.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:118 reviews, 149 commits, 201 PRs in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Neil primarily focused on improving the codebase by addressing typos, fixing comments, and refining log messages. Their contributions involved making updates to various internal files within the master directory, indicating a focus on the core components of the Determined AI platform. Furthermore, the user updated the product name in the Elm webui and revised telemetry reporting in the master, demonstrating involvement in both UI and backend aspects of the project. The user also made code changes to improve documentation.
pytorchdata-sciencedeep-learningdistributed-trainingmachine-learning
apache/mesos
Jan 2016 - May 2017
Apache Mesos
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & System Architect
Back-end Developer & System ArchitectContributions:70 commits in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Neil's contributions focused on refactoring core components of the Apache Mesos project, specifically within the `libprocess` and core scheduler codebases. Their work involved replacing GCC intrinsics and `volatile` keywords with `std::atomic`, which improved thread safety and memory management. They also addressed concurrency issues by modifying and cleaning up internal locking mechanisms, along with changes related to quota and re-registration for the hierarchical roles support. These changes demonstrate a focus on system stability and performance.
apachebig-datacloudmesosjava
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