Stephen Astels
Senior Data Engineer
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolStephen Astels is a Senior Data Engineer and mathematician with 11+ years of applied experience building data-driven products for government and industry, currently shaping digital services at the Canadian Digital Service. He blends deep theoretical training (PhD in Mathematics) with hands-on systems work—from HPC parallel implementations and cryptanalysis to PySpark ETL, ML-based fraud detection, and full-stack government services. At Shopify he turned analytics into production decisions (KPIs, customer selection, fraud prevention), and his open-source contributions include practical work on HDBSCAN clustering tools used by the ML community. Stephen also co-led a cross-platform educational product that was a Global Learning XPRIZE semi-finalist, showing an unusual mix of pedagogy, product design, and engineering. He mentors teams, runs training on bias awareness, and has a track record of translating complex math into performant, deployable code. Based in Ottawa, he is comfortable switching between theory-heavy research and pragmatic implementation to deliver measurable outcomes.
11 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's Degree, Mathematics, Bachelor's Degree, Mathematics at Acadia UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Mathematics, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Mathematics at University of Waterloo
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (9)
algorithm10
machine-learning-algorithms10
python10
clustering10
numpy10
scikit-learn9
scikit9
jupyter-notebook9
data-analysis8
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
scikit-learn-contrib/hdbscan
Apr 2015 - Oct 2015
A high performance implementation of HDBSCAN clustering.
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:13 commits, 5 PRs, 9 pushes in 5 months
Contributions summary:Stephen contributed to the implementation of a labeling function within a notebook environment, suggesting work related to data processing and analysis within the clustering context. The code involves creating a UnionFind class and a labeling function for merging data points. The user's contributions involved adding comments to clarify the purpose of the code, updating the labeling function to reflect algorithm changes, and testing and debugging the labeling code on various datasets.
clustering-evaluationk-meansmachine-learning-algorithmsmachine-learningclustering
cds-snc/notification-terraform
Aug 2021 - Jan 2023
Terraform for notification.canada.ca
Contributions:533 reviews, 87 commits, 562 PRs in 1 year 5 months
notificationsnotificationhclnotification-canada-caterraform
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