Timothy Swena
BigQuery DataFrames Team Lead
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTimothy Swena is a seasoned software engineer and team lead with 16 years of experience building developer-facing tooling and data platforms, currently leading the BigQuery DataFrames team at Google to make analytics and ML in Python more accessible at scale. He combines deep backend engineering—improving BigQuery client libraries, SQLAlchemy dialects, and pandas connectors—with strong developer experience work, producing samples, docs, and test automation across multiple languages. A prolific open-source contributor, Tim has improved projects ranging from pandas and Cirq documentation to the python-bigquery ecosystem and Airflow integrations, often focusing on type safety, testing reliability, and BigQuery-specific features like NUMERIC/INTERVAL and BigQuery Storage API support. His background spans performance benchmarking at Oracle to teaching software engineering at Google Tech Exchange, giving him a pragmatic blend of systems, data, and pedagogy. Outside of work he channels his curiosity into math-driven side projects and pixel art, running a personal LLC that ships small apps and creative tools.
16 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
B.S. Mathematics and Computer Science, B.S. Mathematics and Computer Science at University of Wisconsin-MadisonMaster’s Degree Computational Mathematics, Master’s Degree Computational Mathematics at Texas A&M UniversityNo degree Electrical and Computer Engineering, No degree Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University
Spanish, English
Stackoverflow
14,487reputation
2.1mreached
85answers
11questions
google-bigquery
top-1%
layout
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google-cloud-platform
top-5%
wpf
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python
top-1%
unicode
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Github Skills (123)
apim10
google-cloud-platform10
restructuredtext10
dataflow10
python10
utf10
testing10
rspec10
databases10
sample-size10
bash10
refactor10
phpunit10
ruby10
gcp10
Programming languages (28)
Github contributions (5)
GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-vision
Feb 2016 - Dec 2019
Sample code for Google Cloud Vision
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:91 commits, 93 PRs, 126 pushes in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Timothy contributed to both the Java backend and Android front-end components of the Cloud Vision project. They addressed a bug related to GZIP requests in the Android application, and added a Java text sample that interacts with the Vision API and a local Redis database. The user also updated the Python text sample, converting it to use a batch request for image processing. Furthermore, the user added Travis configuration for Java and iOS samples, and PHP linting.
gcpgoogle-cloud-visionvisiongooglegoogle-cloud-platform
googleapis/python-bigquery-pandas
Apr 2017 - Apr 2022
Google BigQuery connector for pandas
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:19 releases, 146 reviews, 133 commits in 5 years
Contributions summary:Timothy focused on improving the BigQuery-related system tests and the overall quality of the codebase by addressing bugs, improving the reliability and maintainability of test configurations, and removing deprecated features. This involved updating testing infrastructure and dependencies, with specific attention to the authentication mechanism and the transition from the deprecated `oauth2client` to the `google-auth` library, while also enhancing documentation. The contributions included supporting new versions of Google libraries.
data-analyticsdataconnectorgoogle-bigquerybigquery
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