Tim Smith - Senior Software Engineer at AbCellera

Tim Smith

Senior Software Engineer at AbCellera

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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Summary

🤩

Rockstar

🎓

Top School

Tim Smith is a Senior Software Engineer and tech lead in Vancouver with 14 years bridging scientific research and production software to deliver informatically integrated laboratory workflows. He blends a PhD in biomedical engineering and hands-on wet-lab experience with pragmatic software and data-architecture leadership, having led ELN integrations and workflow engineering at AbCellera. At Mozilla he drove experiment-analysis automation and telemetry-derived insights, and his work on Homebrew shows practical open-source systems chops—improving Python packaging, system checks, and build reliability for a widely used package manager. He repeatedly turns complex biological problems into reproducible pipelines, from on-demand primer design and ML classifiers for multiplex sequencing to GB-scale image analysis tools. Colleagues rely on him to translate scientist needs into robust, auditable software and to mentor teams delivering production-ready informatics. He’s equally fluent in Python/R/data science and low-level build/system issues—helpful when “you can’t make bricks without clay.”

14 years of coding experience

6 years of employment as a software developer

TJHSST Diploma, TJHSST Diploma at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology

Bachelor of Science (BS), Engineering: Bioengineering, Bachelor of Science (BS), Engineering: Bioengineering at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering

University of California, Irvine

English, Japanese

Github Skills (8)

homebrew10

macos10

python10

package-management10

ruby9

system-configuration9

build-system9

openssl8

Programming languages (25)

CGoHTMLJSONSvelteJupyter NotebookPonyTypeScript

Github contributions (5)

Homebrew/legacy-homebrew

Jul 2014 - Mar 2016

💀 The former home of Homebrew/homebrew (deprecated)

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:344 commits, 728 PRs, 396 pushes in 1 year 8 months

Contributions summary:Tim primarily contributed to the build process of the Homebrew packages by preventing the installation of bottles (pre-compiled packages) on Xcode-only systems. This was implemented by adding a check for `MacOS::CLT.installed?` in the `pour_bottle?` method of the Python and Python3 formulae. Additional commits addressed the Python and general formula builds.

macoshomebrew

Homebrew/brew

Sep 2014 - Aug 2017

🍺 The missing package manager for macOS (or Linux)

Role in this project:

Backend Developer

Contributions:107 commits, 51 PRs, 22 pushes in 2 years 10 months

Contributions summary:Tim primarily contributed to the Homebrew package manager by implementing and enhancing features related to Python, formula auditing, and system configuration. Their work included adding helper methods for Python package management, implementing checks for OpenSSL and Python framework linkages, and improving the display of configuration information. Furthermore, the user fixed bugs related to symlinks and virtual environments.

brewpackage-managerlinuxrubymissing

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