Sebastian Wallkötter
Product Manager - Data Platform
United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSebastian Wallkötter is a Product Manager for Data Platform with nine years of experience translating research-grade engineering into production data products and pipelines. With a PhD in human–computer interaction and an MS in robotics, he bridges rigorous academic research—especially in social robotics—and pragmatic data engineering to drive business-critical systems. At Schibsted he leads Pulse, the central behavioral-tracking product that feeds ads, recommendations, newsrooms, and analytics, while earlier roles saw him build high-quality data foundations and contribute to scientific rendering and vision tooling. He remains a hands-on engineer and open-source contributor, improving core image-processing libraries like imageio and scikit-image where he refactored APIs, added streaming support, and strengthened algorithmic implementations. Known for combining system-level thinking with attention to algorithmic detail, he focuses on reliability, maintainability, and enabling downstream ML and analytics use cases. Based in the United States, he brings a rare mix of robotics, vision, and product-first data platform expertise.
9 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Engineering Cybernetics, Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Engineering Cybernetics at University of StuttgartMaster of Science - MS Robotics, Master of Science - MS Robotics at University of PlymouthDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Human Computer Interaction, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Human Computer Interaction at Uppsala University
English, German, Swedish
Github Skills (14)
testing10
computer-vision10
scikit-image10
python10
back-end-development10
image-processing10
numpy10
architecture9
architectures9
algorithm9
unit-testing9
algorithms9
api-design8
openmp4
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
imageio/imageio
Dec 2020 - Jan 2023
Python library for reading and writing image data
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:283 reviews, 237 commits, 316 PRs in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Sebastian's contributions primarily focused on refactoring and improving the ImageIO library's core functionality. Their work involved modifying the format manager to function as a singleton, enhancing code structure by introducing abstract classes and helper methods to improve maintainability. The user updated the v3 API, enabling new features like the handling of HTTP streams, and added tests to ensure backward compatibility was maintained. In addition, they made code cleanups.
python-libraryopenexrimageiopythonimage
scikit-image/scikit-image
Aug 2020 - Jul 2022
Image processing in Python
Role in this project:Software Engineer
Software EngineerContributions:71 reviews, 5 commits, 5 PRs in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Sebastian made several contributions to the scikit-image library, including bug fixes, refactoring of existing code, and adding new features. They corrected an issue in the flood fill algorithm, refactored code related to rectangle variable names, and added an example on how to render text onto an image. The user was also involved in adding a rolling ball algorithm for background subtraction.
image-processingpythoncomputer-visionimage
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