Nicholas Cain
Software Engineer at Google
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNicholas Cain is a software engineer in Seattle with 11 years of experience bridging research-grade data engineering and production cloud systems. He holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics and spent much of his career at the Allen Institute building back-end tools to process complex neuroscience experiments and produce Neurodata Without Borders outputs. At Google he moved from research and developer programs into core engineering roles, improving client libraries and sample code for widely used projects like the Google Cloud Python SDK and Speech-to-Text. Nicholas combines a strong theoretical background in mathematical modeling with pragmatic engineering—comfortable refactoring legacy code, designing data pipelines, and shipping reliable developer-facing APIs. An interesting through-line: he routinely translates academic research needs into production-quality tooling that scales across scientific and cloud ecosystems.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Applied Mathematics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Applied Mathematics at University of WashingtonBS, Mathematics, BS, Mathematics at Davidson College
Github Skills (11)
data-analysis10
pandas10
hdf10
refactoring10
pytest10
python10
testing10
apidoc9
api9
documentation8
medical-image-processing7
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
AllenInstitute/AllenSDK
Oct 2016 - Sep 2019
code for reading and processing Allen Institute for Brain Science data
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 415 commits, 259 PRs in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Nicholas primarily focused on implementing features related to analyzing and processing experimental data, particularly those related to visual behavior and Ophys. They added functionality for handling stimulus presentations, reformatting data, and computing statistics related to experimental conditions. They worked on extending the `BehaviorOphysSession` class, and implemented new features that are used in writing a Neurodata Without Borders (NWB) file.
brainneurosciencepythonscienceneuroimaging
googleapis/google-cloud-python
Aug 2021 - Oct 2023
Google Cloud Client Library for Python
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:4 PRs, 2 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Nicholas focused on refactoring and improving sample code within the Google Cloud Speech-to-Text client library for Python. Their work involved removing dependencies, creating separate samples for local and Cloud Storage audio files, and refactoring the associated tests. Furthermore, the user addressed migration-related documentation issues by migrating the default branch from "master" to "main" across various project files. These changes focused on improving sample clarity and migrating legacy code.
gcpappenginepythongoogleclient-library
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