Simon Byrne
Senior Developer Technology Engineer at NVIDIA
Pasadena, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSimon Byrne is a Senior Developer Technology Engineer and mathematician with 14 years of experience building high-performance scientific and GPU-enabled software, currently helping "make GPUs go brrr" at NVIDIA from Pasadena. He led development of the GPU-first CliMA earth system model at Caltech and has deep expertise in numerical computing, probabilistic methods and automatic differentiation informed by a Cambridge PhD in statistics. An active open-source contributor across core Julia projects—including the Julia language, ForwardDiff, Distributions.jl, and the widely used travis-build tooling—he blends low-level math, build systems and tooling to ship robust, portable libraries. He’s comfortable across research and production: porting libm for architectures like PowerPC, hardening HDF5 error handling, and optimizing samplers and plotting internals for Makie.jl. Simon’s profile combines rigorous academic grounding with hands-on systems and DevOps work, making him adept at turning mathematical algorithms into scalable, tested implementations.
14 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Mathematics (Statistics), PhD, Mathematics (Statistics) at University of CambridgeBCom/BSc (Hons), Actuarial/Mathematics, BCom/BSc (Hons), Actuarial/Mathematics at Macquarie University
Github Skills (55)
algorithm10
hdf10
algorithms10
powerpc10
docker10
subsampling10
testing10
statistics10
sampling10
coverage10
c1110
travis-ci10
histogram10
openmpi10
plot10
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
JuliaStats/Distributions.jl
Mar 2013 - Mar 2019
A Julia package for probability distributions and associated functions.
Role in this project:
Data Scientist
Data ScientistContributions:2 releases, 202 commits, 43 PRs in 6 years
Contributions summary:Simon primarily focused on improving the statistical distributions within the `distributions.jl` package. Their contributions included implementing and optimizing various samplers and probability functions for different distributions such as Binomial, Gamma, Weibull, and Poisson. The user also added new distributions like the Kolmogorov distribution and extended existing ones by adding new methods, such as the characteristic functions. Additionally, the user was involved in refactoring code related to statistical methods and evaluation, including creating and updating unit tests.
julia-packagedistributionsstatisticsdata-scienceprobability-distributions
JuliaIO/HDF5.jl
Jun 2021 - Jan 2023
Save and load data in the HDF5 file format from Julia
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:123 reviews, 29 commits, 53 PRs in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Simon primarily contributed to refactoring the HDF5.jl library by implementing a custom error handler and moving C API functions to a submodule. They focused on improving error handling within the library, which involved modifying API functions to throw errors and deprecating the `silence_errors` functionality. The user also worked on refactoring the properties interface, making iterators safe for error handling, and other miscellaneous improvements.
file-formatjulia-languagedata-storagehdf5hdf5-library
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.