Xan Merritt
Member ML Engineer (Consultant) at Independent
Oregon, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolXan Merritt is a versatile machine learning engineer and consultant with 12 years of industry experience building production ML systems from C and Java to Scala and Python. He designs and ships end-to-end pipelines—data ingestion, model training, serving and continuous evaluation—across domains including recommender systems, NLP, image classification and streaming video. A pragmatic, functional-coding practitioner, he combines lean engineering with a strong ethical compass and a track record of improving real products (e.g., boosting audit throughput by 55% and outperforming AWS recommendations for a fashion marketplace). Xan is an active open-source contributor—early PredictionIO committer and contributor to JavaCPP/ONNX integrations and Vowpal Wabbit Java bindings—so he routinely bridges research, infra and tooling. Comfortable as team lead or solo consultant, he excels at cold-start recommendation problems and constrained-data NLP, and is currently seeking remote collaborations.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
BSc, Cognitive Sytems: Computational Intelligence and Design, BSc, Cognitive Sytems: Computational Intelligence and Design at The University of British ColumbiaMSc (ABD), Artificial Intelligence: Learning Systems for Language, Knowledge and Speech, MSc (ABD), Artificial Intelligence: Learning Systems for Language, Knowledge and Speech at University of AmsterdamHigh School, High School at West Island College [ Class Afloat: SV Concordia ]
French, Spanish, English
Github Skills (20)
c-language10
spark10
machine-learning10
onnx10
java10
scala10
javas10
native-library10
cprogramming-language10
mysql9
elearning9
postgresql9
jna9
cpp9
maven9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
apache/predictionio
Jul 2015 - Jul 2019
PredictionIO, a machine learning server for developers and ML engineers.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:68 commits, 34 PRs, 18 pushes in 4 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Xan primarily contributed to improving the PredictionIO machine learning server's backend. Their work involved renaming methods to avoid overloaded methods with default arguments, specifically addressing compatibility issues with Scala 2.11. The user also bumped the default runtime Spark version and fixed issues related to PostgreSQL and MySQL installations. These changes enhanced the system's stability and improved its compatibility with different database systems and software versions.
pythondata-sciencemachine-learningmlopsbig-data
bytedeco/javacpp-presets
Aug 2018 - May 2020
The missing Java distribution of native C++ libraries
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:14 commits, 20 PRs, 80 comments in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Xan contributed to the `bytedeco/javacpp-presets` repository by adding and upgrading presets for various ONNX versions. The commits involve significant code changes within the `onnx/src/main/java/org/bytedeco/javacpp/onnx.java` file, which suggests modifications to the JavaCPP bindings for the ONNX library. The user is primarily focused on integrating and maintaining support for different ONNX releases within the JavaCPP framework.
native-librariespythonmavencppandroid
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