Owen Vallis
Software Engineer, Machine Learning at OpenAI
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolOwen Vallis is a machine learning software engineer and researcher with 11 years of experience building production ML systems and anti-abuse tooling at top-tier companies including Google and OpenAI. A co-founder of Kadenze and former Professor of Creative Technologies, he blends academic rigor—holding a PhD in Sonic Arts—with practical engineering across recommendation, fraud detection, and similarity learning. He has shipped backend ML improvements and bug fixes to notable open-source projects like tensorflow/similarity, demonstrating attention to core algorithmic correctness as well as performance and typing improvements. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he’s comfortable moving between research, product, and large-scale production environments, and brings an uncommon background in audio and creative tech to applied ML problems.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Music Technology, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Music Technology at California Institute of the ArtsDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Sonic Arts, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Sonic Arts at Victoria University of Wellington
Github Skills (11)
algorithm10
numerical-optimization10
code-optimization10
algorithms10
machine-learning10
tensorflow10
optimisation10
python10
optimization10
testing9
develop9
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
tensorflow/similarity
Dec 2020 - Jan 2023
TensorFlow Similarity is a python package focused on making similarity learning quick and easy.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & ML Engineer
Back-end Developer & ML EngineerContributions:1 release, 92 reviews, 442 commits in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Owen made a variety of contributions including bug fixes, improvements to existing code, and refactoring. The user addressed a failing test case by creating an empty SimilarityModel to pass input layers and output layers. They also added typing support to several classes and methods within the `tensorflow_similarity/samplers` module, replacing `random.shuffle` with `random.sample` to improve performance. Furthermore, they fixed incorrect loss calculation, highlighting involvement with the core machine learning aspects of the project.
pythonsimilarity-searchmetric-learningtensorflowbarlow-twins
owenvallis/dotfiles_v2
Mar 2021 - Oct 2022
Contributions:8 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 7 months
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