Willem Pienaar
Co-Founder And CTO at Cleric
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWillem Pienaar is a seasoned engineering leader and founder with 11 years of experience building production-grade ML platforms and developer tools. As Co-Founder and CTO of Cleric and former Principal Engineer at Tecton, he co-created and led Feast, the widely used open-source feature store, contributing core testing infrastructure, Python SDK versioning, and automation for reliable deployments. He previously built and scaled Gojek’s ML platform and a 15-engineer team, delivering mission-critical systems for recommendations, pricing, and fraud detection. Based in San Francisco with a strong academic foundation from Georgia Tech and Stellenbosch, he blends hands-on DevOps and ML engineering with product-focused platform strategy. Notably, he bridges OSS stewardship and practical SRE/ML workflows by shipping reproducible test clusters and Terraform-based CI for large-scale feature store deployments.
11 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS Computer Science, Master of Science - MS Computer Science at Georgia Institute of TechnologyBachelor of Engineering (BEng) Mechatronics, Bachelor of Engineering (BEng) Mechatronics at Stellenbosch University
English, Afrikaans
Stackoverflow
21reputation
86reached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (11)
terraformer10
docker10
python10
dockers10
terraform10
cicd10
testing10
bash9
mlops9
kubernetes-helm6
feast6
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
feast-dev/feast
Dec 2018 - Mar 2022
The Open Source Feature Store for Machine Learning
Role in this project:
DevOps & ML Engineer
DevOps & ML EngineerContributions:15 releases, 1325 reviews, 783 commits in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Willem contributed significantly to the project by adding a testing folder for infrastructure and running tests, focusing on deploying the testing infrastructure and automating the testing process. They created test infrastructure, including Terraform remote state configuration and config for a testing cluster. The user also contributed to the Python SDK with the CLI configuration command, and implemented a full versioning for the Python SDK, as well as added new files to the core service, and implemented code updates.
pythondata-qualitydata-sciencemlmachine-learning
woop/awesome-quantified-self
Aug 2016 - Mar 2021
:bar_chart: Websites, Resources, Devices, Wearables, Applications, and Platforms for Self Tracking
Contributions:6 reviews, 90 commits, 71 PRs in 4 years 8 months
chartquantifiedquantified-selfbar-chartplatforms
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