Walt Shands
Genomics Data System DevOps Engineer
Soquel, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolWalt Shands is a founder and senior software engineer with over a decade of experience building cloud-native, full‑stack systems for genomics and life‑sciences workloads. He has led large migrations (including moving half a petabyte of genomic data to AWS S3), built serverless bioinformatics tooling and React UIs, and architected secure, multi‑tenant control planes for GPU training orchestration. Comfortable across Terraform, AWS, Python, WDL/CWL, and CI/CD, he combines hands‑on pipeline debugging with infrastructure engineering to make research workflows reliable and reproducible. His background spans enterprise and research settings—from Dockstore and TopMed at UCSC to production bioinformatics at Biogen—and he brings an uncommon blend of performance optimization (FPGA/offload experience) and product delivery. Based in Soquel, CA, he pairs an MS and BS in computer science with an MBA, and is drawn to hard problems that accelerate scientific discovery.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
MBA business administration, MBA business administration at Santa Clara UniversityBS computer science, BS computer science at Columbia University
English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (76)
command-line-interface10
seq10
dockstore10
nextflow10
scientific-workflow10
sequence-analysis10
sequencing10
wdl10
docker10
bioinformatics10
gridengine9
api9
angular9
rna-seq9
slurm9
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
wshands/hmmer-docker
Apr 2019 - Sep 2020
Docker support for HMMER-- biological sequence analysis using profile HMMs
Contributions:2 releases, 6 PRs, 45 pushes in 1 year 5 months
dockersequence-analysis
wshands/dnanexus_symlink_internal
Nov 2023 - Dec 2023
Contributions:65 PRs, 106 pushes, 3 branches in 23 days
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