Timo Wilken
Research Software Engineer at The University of Texas at Arlington
Saint-Genis-Pouilly, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolTimo Wilken is a research software engineer with 11 years of experience building and maintaining CI/CD, build and distributed computing infrastructure for large-scale physics experiments, currently working on ATLAS distributed computing at CERN via The University of Texas at Arlington. He has deep hands-on expertise in build systems, automation and cross-platform compatibility—demonstrated by contributions to high-profile ALICE projects such as AliceO2, AliRoot and alidist where he improved modularization, resolved dependency issues and hardened CI pipelines. Timo combines academic training in Earth Sciences from the University of Cambridge with practical DevOps and backend engineering skills, a blend that helps him bridge domain research needs and production-grade tooling. Outside core engineering he applies product-minded thinking to community-facing services, having designed and maintained student union and club websites and even built an anonymous messaging feature. An experienced glider pilot with a Bronze badge and a European private pilot licence, he brings disciplined operational thinking and risk awareness to complex system reliability challenges.
11 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
MSci, Earth Sciences, class 2:1, MSci, Earth Sciences, class 2:1 at University of Cambridge
English, German, Spanish, French, Latin
Github Skills (25)
root-view10
c-language10
package-management10
python10
scripting10
cer10
alice10
bash10
cmake10
cicd10
exp10
script10
physics10
document-root10
build-automation10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
alisw/alidist
Oct 2020 - Jan 2023
Recipes to build ALICE software
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer & Build Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Build EngineerContributions:60 reviews, 134 commits, 202 PRs in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Timo primarily contributed to improving the build and CI/CD processes for the ALICE software project. They addressed issues related to external dependencies like `libtirpc`, `lhapdf`, and `bzip2`, resolving build failures and ensuring compatibility. Further work involved fixing scripts for python modules and correcting compilation configurations for ROOT and clang to maintain build stability across different operating systems and compilers. The user also introduced and maintained build system tools and dependencies for O2Physics and other components.
physicsrecipescernalicealice-experiment
AliceO2Group/AliceO2
Oct 2020 - Jan 2023
O2 software project for the ALICE experiment at CERN
Role in this project:Backend & Automation Engineer
Backend & Automation EngineerContributions:1 release, 12 reviews, 33 commits in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Timo primarily contributed to the project by addressing code quality issues, specifically related to code formatting (braces). They also focused on refactoring code to export required headers for external dependencies, indicating work on modularization and code organization. Additionally, they automated build processes by modifying script headers to be compatible with a CI/CD system, which reflects contributions to the project's build infrastructure. Furthermore, they addressed compatibility issues by disabling unit tests on architectures lacking SSE2.
c-plus-plusalice-experimentalicecern
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