Quentin Riffard
Senior Software Engineer at Zoox
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolQuentin Riffard is a Senior Software Engineer with a decade of experience applying advanced computing to dark matter detection and autonomous systems, now based in San Francisco. Trained as a particle physicist (PhD), he has led simulation teams, built GPU photon raytracers and Monte Carlo frameworks, and architected HPC/HTC data-production pipelines that generated hundreds of terabytes for international experiments. He combines C++ and Python expertise with statistics, ML-accelerated simulation, and CI/CD to turn complex physical models into scalable, validated software. Quentin has moved from academic leadership at Berkeley Lab to production engineering at robotics companies like Nuro and Zoox, bringing a rare blend of scientific rigor and production-grade systems design. He enjoys treating data like a puzzle—using simulation “bricks” to explain observations—and has repeatedly sped up experiments via biasing techniques and ML-driven acceleration.
10 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Ph-D, Astroparticules, Ph-D, Astroparticules at Université Grenoble AlpesMaster 2 Physique Subatomique et Astroparticules, Physique Subatomique et Astroparticules, Master 2 Physique Subatomique et Astroparticules, Physique Subatomique et Astroparticules at Université Joseph Fourier (Grenoble I)
French, English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
40reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (18)
simulate10
linux10
energy10
ruby10
homebrew10
argon10
macos10
package-manager10
modeling-tool9
simulation9
physics9
modeling9
formatting6
python6
science3
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
riffard/dm_calc
Apr 2018 - Jan 2019
Contributions:13 pushes, 1 branch in 9 months
riffard/homebrew-core
Dec 2020 - Jan 2021
🍻 Default formulae for the missing package manager for macOS
Contributions:18 pushes, 4 branches in 1 month
macosformulaepackage-managermissing
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