Sean Talts
Staff Software Engineer at Google
New York City Metropolitan Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSean Talts is a Staff Software Engineer with 11 years of engineering experience building high-performance systems and probabilistic programming tools, currently applying stats and machine learning to optimize Google's global storage infrastructure. He has deep backend and C++ expertise from core contributions to the Stan ecosystem—improving the Stan Math library, exposing matrix utilities, and adding regression models and tests that underpin probabilistic modeling used by researchers worldwide. Sean's career spans quantitative and production environments including Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, and Bridgewater, where he built analytic tooling, compilers, and natural-language interfaces for research workflows. He’s fluent in scaling services and data-intensive systems from his time at eBay and Lot18, and he brings a researcher’s rigor to production code, often focusing on correctness, testing, and refactoring for long-term maintainability. A University of Virginia-trained computer engineer, he combines low-level numerical work with practical ML-driven optimization at planetary scale.
11 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Engineering, BS, Computer Engineering at University of Virginia
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (25)
bayesian-statistics10
unit-testing10
data-generation10
c-language10
testing10
mathematics10
system-testing10
math10
regression-analysis10
automatic-differentiation10
bayesian10
statistical-models10
qtest10
stan10
cprogramming-language10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
stan-dev/stan
Jan 2017 - Oct 2019
Stan development repository. The master branch contains the current release. The develop branch contains the latest stable development. See the Developer Process Wiki for details.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 releases, 204 commits, 94 PRs in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Sean contributed to the development and maintenance of the Stan development repository. Their work involved exposing the `to_matrix` function, which enhances matrix manipulation capabilities within the Stan language. They also updated version numbers, added built documentation, and merged changes from the develop branch. Further contributions included updating version numbers and merging the develop branch into the release branch.
bayesian-inferencestanmasterbayesian-statisticsdetails
stan-dev/example-models
Apr 2018 - Sep 2019
Example models for Stan
Role in this project:Data Scientist
Data ScientistContributions:15 commits, 4 PRs, 14 pushes in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Sean contributed to example models for Stan, focusing on regression testing. Their commits involved adding new regression models, updating existing ones, and generating synthetic data. The changes involved modifications to data files and model definitions, indicating a focus on model development and evaluation within the Stan framework.
stan
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