Shyam Dwaraknath
Software Engineer at Waymo
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolShyam Dwaraknath is a software engineer and scientific leader with 10 years of experience building data-driven systems at the intersection of autonomous systems, materials science, and energy. He has driven evaluation and safety frameworks for AVs at Cruise and now applies his expertise to Waymo, after leading battery data science and engineering efforts at Rivian. With a PhD in Nuclear Engineering and a track record at national labs, he has architected scalable scientific data pipelines and algorithms that boosted computational throughput by orders of magnitude. An active open-source contributor, he has strengthened core materials-science tools like pymatgen, atomate, and Fireworks—adding epitaxy, defect, and workflow features that power the Materials Project. Colleagues describe him as impact-driven and multidisciplinary, combining first-principles thinking with practical software and cloud infrastructure skills. He’s based in San Francisco and known for translating deep domain knowledge into production-grade systems that bridge research and deployment.
10 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's Degree Nuclear Engineering, Bachelor's Degree Nuclear Engineering at University of California, BerkeleyDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Nuclear Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Nuclear Engineering at University of Michigan
Github Skills (18)
database-api10
python10
databases10
data-management10
mongodb-database10
network-interface10
workflow-management10
mongodb10
database10
computational-materials-science10
testing9
command-line-interface9
command-line9
cli9
documentation8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
hackingmaterials/atomate
Apr 2016 - Dec 2018
atomate is a powerful software for computational materials science and contains pre-built workflows.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:258 commits, 29 PRs, 44 comments in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Shyam's commits primarily focus on modifications to the `atomate` package, which is designed for computational materials science. They introduced a new task, `ToDbTask`, and made significant changes to existing modules, including `vasp.firetasks.parse_outputs.py`, `vasp.drones.py`, and `vasp.workflows.base.single_vasp.py`, to enable the insertion of data from calculations into a database. They also made improvements to the `MMVaspToDbTaskDrone` to enhance serialization. These changes were part of a broader effort to refactor and improve data management within the atomate framework.
sciencecomputational-materials-sciencecomputational-materialsmaterials-scienceworkflows
materialsproject/pymatgen
Feb 2016 - Jul 2021
Python Materials Genomics (pymatgen) is a robust materials analysis code that defines classes for structures and molecules with support for many electronic structure codes. It powers the Materials Project.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:19 reviews, 294 commits, 37 PRs in 5 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Shyam contributed to the pymatgen library by adding and refactoring core classes related to interface generation and analysis, including the ZSL (Zur and McGill) matching algorithm, a new DefectEntry class, and the SubstrateAnalyzer. They implemented the ability to compute strain and elastic energies within the substrate analyzer framework. Their work focused on improvements to the codebase by adding in the epitaxy logic back into the class and refactoring, testing, and implementing improvements to existing code.
moleculespythonscienceelectronic-structurepowers
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