Nicholas Saunders
Senior Software Engineer at Google
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNicholas Saunders is a Senior Software Engineer based in Seattle with a decade of professional experience spanning backend systems, web development, and developer tooling. Currently at Google after progressing from Software Engineer to Senior SWE, he brings production-grade expertise in scalable services and automation informed by prior internships at Amazon where he cut onboarding time for proxy configurations from a week to a day. A former USC Computer Science student and course producer, he pairs strong mentoring and teaching experience with hands-on implementation of full-stack features and developer-facing tools. He also contributes to open-source astronomy tooling—improving core functionality in the widely used lightkurve package for Kepler and TESS time-series analysis—highlighting an uncommon blend of industry software engineering and scientific data-processing skills. Known for pragmatic problem solving, he excels at turning research-grade code into robust, user-friendly libraries and internal services.
10 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science at University of Southern CaliforniaThe American University of Paris
Github Skills (9)
astroquery10
astropy10
time-series10
python10
data-processing10
data-analysis10
astronomy9
astrophysics9
fits9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
lightkurve/lightkurve
Sep 2018 - Apr 2021
A friendly package for Kepler & TESS time series analysis in Python.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Astronomer
Back-end Developer & AstronomerContributions:1 review, 111 commits, 50 PRs in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Nicholas primarily contributed to improving the core functionality of the `lightkurve` package, which involves data analysis of Kepler and TESS time series. Their commits include updating the MAST download directory, reworking the search interface, and suppressing output statements to improve the package's usability. The user also fixed bugs related to plotting, data downloading, and the handling of FITS files, demonstrating a focus on data processing and analysis within the context of astronomical research.
pythontime-serieskeplerk2tess
nksaunders/scope
Oct 2017 - May 2021
Simulated CCD Observations for Photometric Experimentation
Contributions:7 releases, 405 commits, 10 PRs in 3 years 6 months
pythonexperimentationsimulationobservationsccd
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