Sam Firke - Senior Data Engineer

Sam Firke

Senior Data Engineer

Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States

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Summary

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Sam Firke is a Senior Data Engineer in Ann Arbor with 11 years of experience applying modern data stacks to help cities turn messy, multi-application data into actionable services. He runs end-to-end pipelines (Airflow, Azure containers, Superset) for the City of Ann Arbor, builds custom Python tooling, and pilots AI projects across domains from asset management to water treatment. An active open-source contributor and Apache Superset PMC member, he’s improved front-end UX, backend security, and community documentation for a widely used BI platform. His background includes leading a data science shift at TNTP—introducing R, Git, reproducible workflows, and peer code review—and founding a community borrowing platform, Meutch. Pragmatic and people-focused, Sam combines production engineering with testing rigor (dplyr test work) and a teacher’s instinct for making data useful to frontline city workers.

11 years of coding experience

9 years of employment as a software developer

Master of Arts in Teaching, Secondary Education, Master of Arts in Teaching, Secondary Education at National Louis University

BA, Information Science, Linguistics, BA, Information Science, Linguistics at Cornell University

Stackoverflow

Stats

22,215reputation

7.1mreached

251answers

65questions

Badges

google-sheets

top-5%

top-1%

duplicates

top-5%

csv

top-5%

regex

top-5%

aggregate

top-1%

Github Skills (43)

data-visualizations10

aggregate10

test-driven-design10

data-science10

r10

testing10

data-manipulation10

data-visualisation10

tidyverse10

dataframe10

dplyr10

apache-superset10

front-end-development10

data-cleaning10

tidyr10

Programming languages (13)

C++CTeXGoHTMLTuringTypeScriptR

Github contributions (5)

sfirke/janitor

Apr 2016 - Jan 2023

simple tools for data cleaning in R

Role in this project:

Data Scientist

Contributions:13 releases, 47 reviews, 797 commits in 6 years 10 months

Contributions summary:Sam was involved in the development of a data cleaning package for R, as indicated by the creation and modification of functions related to cleaning data. They focused on the implementation of several data cleaning tools like removing empty rows and columns, standardizing variable names, and converting numeric data into a Date class, along with a collection of tools like tabyls for visualizing results and testing data accuracy. The user also implemented the ability to handle missing factor levels, and ensured that a 3-way tabyl keeps factor levels properly.

spsstabulationsdata-analysistidyverser-package

apache/superset

Jun 2022 - Jan 2023

Apache Superset is a Data Visualization and Data Exploration Platform

Role in this project:

Full-stack Developer

Contributions:187 reviews, 5 commits, 165 PRs in 7 months

Contributions summary:Sam primarily contributed to the Superset frontend, refactoring components, improving the user interface, and fixing bugs related to the display of charts and dashboards. They made improvements to the reporting modal, and also worked on backend configurations related to security and file uploads. Furthermore, the user addressed documentation issues and made code improvements on existing features, and improved the functionality of the plotting of data in the frontend.

pythonapache-supersetflaskbusiness-analyticsbusiness-intelligence

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