Steven Silvester
Senior Software Engineer at MongoDB
Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSteven Silvester is a senior software engineer and long-time open source leader with 14 years of experience building and maintaining large-scale developer tools and backend systems. A Project Jupyter Steering Council member and 2017 ACM Software System Award recipient, he has driven core work on JupyterLab, nbconvert, ipykernel and numerous other high-impact projects that power scientific computing and interactive notebooks. He combines hands-on backend, DevOps and release engineering expertise with front-end and testing experience—refactoring CI/CD pipelines, adding pre-commit automation, and improving cross-platform builds across projects like matplotlib, xterm.js and scikit-image. Steven has held senior engineering and leadership roles at MongoDB, AWS, Apple and Anaconda, consistently shipping production services such as SageMaker Studio and database integrations. Equally comfortable writing technical specs and changelogs as writing complex algorithms, he brings a developer-first mindset to product-quality engineering and community stewardship. Based in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, he often surfaces subtle infrastructure and documentation improvements that materially increase long-term maintainability.
14 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
BS Electrical Engineering, BS Electrical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic InstituteMaster's degree Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Master's degree Electrical and Electronics Engineering at University of Florida
Stackoverflow
151reputation
4kreached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (121)
notebook10
python10
multithreading10
image-processing10
testing10
databases10
bash10
ipython10
refactor10
subprocess10
automation10
bson10
build-automation10
refactoring10
threaded10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
jupyterlab/jupyterlab-demo
Jun 2017 - Jul 2021
Demonstrations of JupyterLab
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:1 review, 134 commits, 28 PRs in 4 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Steven primarily focused on improving the build and environment setup for the JupyterLab demo. They implemented cross-platform support, updated the build process, and refined the removal of demo directories. The commits include setting up environment configurations, installing necessary dependencies, and streamlining the build process for a smoother development experience. They also addressed platform-specific behavior using `rmdir` commands.
jupyterlab-extensionjupyter-notebookjupyterlabjupyter-widgetjupyter
jupyter-server/jupyter_server
May 2019 - Jan 2023
The backend—i.e. core services, APIs, and REST endpoints—to Jupyter web applications.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:37 releases, 291 reviews, 316 commits in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Steven contributed to the backend services of the Jupyter server by cleaning up documentation and preventing the redefinition of Prometheus metrics. They addressed versioning issues and frequently bumped and released versions of the server. Additionally, they updated the contributor link and made significant contributions to integrating and handling pending kernels within the system.
web-applicationspythoncore-servicesjupyter-notebookendpoints
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