Thomas Li

San Jose, California, United States

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Summary

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Rockstar

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Top School

Thomas Li is a junior Computer Science student at the University of Maryland and an active open-source engineer with seven years of practical experience in data tooling and build systems. He maintains and contributes to flagship scientific Python projects—most notably as a pandas maintainer and as a build/CI engineer for NumPy—working on performance improvements, release automation, and cross-platform builds including arm64 support. At Rapids (cudf) he migrated core functionality to pylibcudf APIs, improving performance and maintainability for GPU DataFrame workloads. Comfortable in Python and Java and currently learning C, he pairs data-science-focused development with lower-level interests like compilers and CI infrastructure. Based in San Jose, he has production experience across community-run organizations (NumFOCUS) and large tech (Meta), blending contributor-first open-source practice with engineering at scale. Notably, his work spans both algorithmic improvements (e.g., faster Kendall correlation in pandas) and engineering plumbing that enables reliable scientific package distribution.

7 years of coding experience

2 years of employment as a software developer

Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Senior, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Senior at University of Maryland

English, Chinese, French

Github Skills (31)

github-ci10

c-language10

python10

dataframes10

pandas10

cudf10

wheels10

cicd10

dataframe10

numpy10

cython10

build-automation10

numba10

cprogramming-language10

githubaction-workflow10

Programming languages (10)

TypeScriptJavaC++ShellRustDIGITAL Command LanguageJavaScriptJupyter Notebook

Github contributions (5)

pandas-dev/pandas

Dec 2019 - Jan 2023

Flexible and powerful data analysis / manipulation library for Python, providing labeled data structures similar to R data.frame objects, statistical functions, and much more

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer & Data Scientist

Contributions:10 releases, 880 reviews, 120 commits in 3 years 1 month

Contributions summary:Thomas's contributions primarily involved improving the pandas library's functionality. They focused on code improvements by utilizing more modern f-string formatting, as well as refactoring and optimizing existing codebase by adding a performance improvement in the Kendall correlation calculations. They also worked on enhancements such as adding decimal support to read_excel and further expanded functionality for numerical values and for handling missing values in the numba engine.

pythondatalabeled-datamanipulationdataframes

rapidsai/cudf

May 2024 - Sep 2024

cuDF - GPU DataFrame Library

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:167 reviews, 32 PRs, 2 pushes in 4 months

Contributions summary:The user, Thomas Li, primarily focused on migrating existing functionality to use the pylibcudf APIs. Their work included migrating and refactoring code related to string manipulation, JSON and Parquet I/O, quantile calculations, and expression handling. This involved significant code changes within the `cudf` library, specifically targeting the use of new, more performant pylibcudf APIs. The overall impact was to improve the performance and maintainability of the cudf library.

cudadataframe-librarydata-analysiscppcudf

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