Tonnam Balankura
Machine Learning Engineer at Meta
Dallas, Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolTonnam Balankura is a machine learning engineer with a PhD in chemical engineering and over a decade of experience building and productionizing NLP and ML systems, now at Meta after leading NLP efforts at UnitedHealth Group. He combines hands-on model development, deployment, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) with data engineering expertise in PySpark and Spark-Scala to deliver reliable clinical information extraction pipelines. At UnitedHealth he migrated on-prem systems to AWS, maintained core NLP engines, and drove cross-functional stakeholder alignment for medical chart abstraction. His background in molecular simulation and open-source contributions—including adding a new core pair potential to the widely used LAMMPS simulator—reflects deep algorithmic and systems-level skills beyond typical ML work. Fluent in Python, SQL, Luigi and CI/CD practices, he emphasizes testing, documentation, and simplicity in production codebases. Based in Dallas, he blends academic rigor with pragmatic engineering to turn messy clinical text into structured, research-ready data.
10 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Engineering Chemical Engineering, Bachelor of Engineering Chemical Engineering at Thammasat UniversityHigh School Mathematics, High School Mathematics at Shrewsbury International School, BangkokDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Chemical Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Chemical Engineering at Penn State UniversityFront-End Web Development Certification Computer Software Engineering, Front-End Web Development Certification Computer Software Engineering at freeCodeCamp
Thai, English
Stackoverflow
123reputation
13kreached
3answers
1question
Github Skills (20)
algorithm10
simulation10
algorithms10
c-language10
molecular-simulation10
simulations10
lammps10
data-structure10
molecular-dynamics-simulation10
nonlinear-dynamics10
data-structures10
cprogramming-language10
sparkr6
sql6
scikit-learn6
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
lammps/lammps
Mar 2017 - Mar 2017
Public development project of the LAMMPS MD software package
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:16 commits, 1 PR, 4 comments in 8 days
Contributions summary:Tonnam contributed to the LAMMPS MD software package by implementing a new pair potential, `pair_momb`, which is a core functionality within molecular dynamics simulations. The commits demonstrate the creation of the `pair_momb.cpp` and `pair_momb.h` files, the core logic of the force calculation, and initialization routines, indicating significant involvement in the development of the simulation engine. Furthermore, the user updated the code style to conform to the project's coding guidelines and added example input files, illustrating a commitment to code quality and usability. The code changes heavily involve implementing a new force calculation method, the core function of the LAMMPS simulator.
lammpsmolecular-dynamicssimulationkokkos
tonnamb/Dissertation-Proposal
Jul 2015 - Jul 2015
Contributions:125 pushes, 1 branch in 10 days
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