Steve Bronder
Software Engineer at Simons Foundation
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSteve Bronder is a software engineer with 11 years' experience blending numerical methods, probabilistic programming, and applied data science across academia and industry. Currently at the Simons Foundation after leading quantitative software efforts at Columbia’s Department of Statistics, he has driven major performance wins in Stan—optimizing autodiff memory patterns and parallel MCMC to cut runtimes and memory use by measurable margins. His background includes production risk modeling and automation at Capital One, where he built ML models, self‑service data platforms, and AWS-hosted reporting that turned monthly workflows into daily decision tools. An active open-source contributor to core Stan projects (rstan, stan, stan‑math), he focuses on C++ numerical stability and build/tooling improvements that reduce subtle failure modes on Windows and in matrix computations. Comfortable in R, C++, and Python, he also freelances on tooling and analysis and maintains a public presence at stevebronder.com.
11 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
BSBA, Economics, BSBA, Economics at Duquesne UniversityMaster’s Degree, Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences, Master’s Degree, Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences at Columbia University in the City of New York
Stackoverflow
936reputation
29kreached
12answers
8questions
Github Skills (34)
deco10
matrix-decomposition10
c-language10
r-package10
decomposition10
r10
mathematical-optimization10
bayesian10
eigen10
numerical-methods10
decompose10
stan10
cpp-templates10
cprogramming-language10
linear-algebra10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
stan-dev/stan
Sep 2019 - Sep 2022
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:347 reviews, 673 commits, 121 PRs in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Steve implemented and modified core functionalities, specifically related to variable assignment in the Stan probabilistic programming language, as seen in the commits that involved changes to the `lvalue.hpp` and `rvalue.hpp` files. The commits' focus was on enhancing the assignment of values to variables, handling specific matrix, vector, and scalar operations which are essential for numerical computing and statistical modeling. These commits involve modifications in different types of indexing and assignments.
bayesian-inferencestanmasterbayesian-statisticsdetails
stan-dev/math
Sep 2017 - Nov 2022
The Stan Math Library is a C++ template library for automatic differentiation of any order using forward, reverse, and mixed modes. It includes a range of built-in functions for probabilistic modeling, linear algebra, and equation solving.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Numerical Methods Specialist
Back-end Developer & Numerical Methods SpecialistContributions:1028 reviews, 2794 commits, 375 PRs in 5 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Steve's contributions focus on the implementation and enhancement of numerical methods, particularly related to the Cholesky decomposition and other linear algebra routines. They have modified and debugged core mathematical functions within the Stan Math Library, demonstrating expertise in areas like integration and numerical stability. The user also refactored and optimized a few existing functions for vector operations, reflecting a strong understanding of underlying numerical algorithms.
automatic-differentiationprobabilistic-modelingsundialsmodestemplate-library
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