Samuel Ainsworth
Senior Research Scientist at Waymo
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSamuel Ainsworth is a Senior Research Scientist with 14 years of experience applying machine learning, numerical methods, and systems engineering to real-world robotics and perception problems. He blends deep academic training (PhD in Computer Science from University of Washington) with hands-on production work at Waymo and Cruise, including real-time CUDA implementations for LIDAR scene flow and large-scale prediction systems. An active open-source contributor, he’s improved numerical ODE solvers in JAX/TFP and helped harden cross-platform tooling (notably a Rust rewrite of coreutils), showing attention to both algorithmic correctness and low-level robustness. His background spans QA/test automation, probabilistic modeling, and distributed computation, evidencing a pragmatist who values reproducible science and production reliability. Based in New York, he combines research-grade rigor with the practical engineering chops to move prototypes into deployed systems. Colleagues will notice he frequently focuses on edge-case correctness—byte-level file handling, non-UTF-8 paths, and floating-point tolerance—that quietly prevents costly failures in complex pipelines.
13 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science at University of WashingtonB.Sc. with Honors Applied Math and Computer Science, B.Sc. with Honors Applied Math and Computer Science at Brown UniversityOconee County High School
English, Spanish
Stackoverflow
366reputation
12kreached
3answers
0questions
Github Skills (34)
robotics10
python10
data-science10
testing10
machine-learning10
hpc10
numpy10
coreutils10
parallel-computing10
numerical-methods10
command-line-tool10
rust10
jax10
julia10
test-automation10
Programming languages (35)
Github contributions (5)
JuliaLang/julia
Jan 2015 - Apr 2021
The Julia Programming Language
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:1 review, 5 commits, 4 PRs in 6 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Samuel focused on enhancing the testing infrastructure for the Julia programming language, specifically related to the DArray module. Their contributions include adding comprehensive tests for `mapreduce` functionality within DArrays, ensuring functional equivalence with standard methods. The user also addressed potential floating-point errors in the test suite to ensure reliable test results. Finally, the user contributed by adding documentation comments to help with distributed processing testing.
sciencejulia-languagemachine-learningjulialangpetsc
jax-ml/jax
Feb 2022 - Feb 2022
Composable transformations of Python+NumPy programs: differentiate, vectorize, JIT to GPU/TPU, and more
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:1 commit, 9 PRs, 138 comments in 1 day
Contributions summary:Samuel primarily focused on testing and quality assurance aspects of the JAX library, specifically related to the `odeint` function for solving ordinary differential equations. Their contributions include adding new tests for pytree states and time-dependent dynamics, and modifying existing tests. They also made improvements such as using `onp` instead of `np` in the test suite, and relaxing tolerances to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the numerical integration methods.
pytorchpythonjitautomatic-differentiationgpu
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