Yifan Mai
Research Engineer at Stanford University
Mountain View, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolYifan Mai is a research software engineer with 14 years of experience building scalable, high-performance systems across industry and academia, currently working on large AI models at Stanford with Professor Percy Liang. He previously improved cost and scalability for Cloud Dataflow at Google and helped found and scale engineering at Coursera, delivering major migrations, disaster recovery, and developer productivity gains. Yifan blends deep systems and ML knowledge—his open-source work includes performance optimizations to the widely used Tone.js audio framework and backend/devops contributions to Stanford’s HELM evaluation framework. Comfortable across backend, DevOps, and research codebases, he has a track record of improving testing, static analysis, and runtime performance. Based in Mountain View, he pairs strong engineering craftsmanship with academic rigor from BS/MS degrees in Computer Science at Stanford.
14 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science at Stanford University
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
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0questions
Github Skills (15)
mypy10
javascript10
web-audio-api10
pytest10
performance-optimization10
python10
typescript-types9
build-automation9
typescript9
typescripts9
synthesis9
scheduling9
caching9
testing8
cicd8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
stanford-crfm/helm
Sep 2022 - Mar 2023
Holistic Evaluation of Language Models (HELM), a framework to increase the transparency of language models (https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.09110). This framework is also used to evaluate text-to-image models in HEIM (https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.04287) and vision-language models in VHELM (https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07112).
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:13 releases, 1349 reviews, 315 commits in 5 months
Contributions summary:Yifan primarily contributed to the project's back-end infrastructure, focusing on code improvements and addressing mypy errors. They made changes to the `setup.py` file, re-enabled a test service, and fixed test contamination issues, indicating a focus on testing and build processes. Furthermore, the user addressed mypy errors across the codebase and installed mypy stub packages, demonstrating a commitment to code quality and static analysis. They also worked on making the cache configuration more flexible with a follower cache.
nlparxivabsberthelm
Tonejs/Tone.js
Dec 2021 - Mar 2022
A Web Audio framework for making interactive music in the browser.
Role in this project:Software Engineer (focused on performance and optimization)
Software Engineer (focused on performance and optimization)Contributions:2 reviews, 7 commits, 4 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Yifan made several commits focused on optimizing the `TickSource` class in the Tone.js library. They memoized the `getTicksAtTime` and `getSecondsAtTime` methods for improved performance and fixed issues related to recomputing values after events were modified. In addition, the user implemented the `Pattern.index` method, which was missing after a TypeScript conversion. Furthermore, they improved the performance of the Meter component and ensured time signals were correctly synchronized to the transport.
schedulingtonebrowserjavascriptsynthesis
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