Zach Bjornson
Senior Director, Informatics
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZach Bjornson is a Senior Director of Informatics in San Francisco with 15 years of experience at the intersection of microbiology, immunology, and high-performance software engineering. He leads CellEngine at CellCarta, bringing a rare combination of wet-lab PhD training and systems-level engineering that has driven lab automation, real-time data visualization, and scalable bioinformatics platforms. Zach is a hands-on performance hacker—contributing optimizations to Node.js, node-canvas, and RAPIDS cuML (notably a 53% speedup in PutImageData and memory/performance fixes in t-SNE)—and he thrives on squeezing more performance from C++, JavaScript, and SIMD. His background includes leading a $3M FDA-funded CyTOF project at Stanford and work on pathogen detection at top labs, which informs pragmatic design decisions that bridge biology and production software. Colleagues rely on him to translate complex experimental requirements into efficient, reliable systems and to mentor teams building real-time, collaborative analysis tools.
15 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
SB Biology, SB Biology at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Microbiology & Immunology, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Microbiology & Immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine
Stackoverflow
14,109reputation
1.6mreached
167answers
54questions
firefox
top-5%
mongoose
top-5%
canvas
top-1%
javascript
top-5%
visual-studio-code
top-1%
buffer
top-5%
Github Skills (48)
algorithm10
visual-studio-code10
monitoring10
javascript10
c-language10
buffer10
canvas2d10
buffering10
canvas10
testing10
machine-learning10
cluster-computing10
machine-learning-algorithms10
tsne10
nvidia10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
Automattic/node-canvas
Jun 2013 - Jan 2023
Node canvas is a Cairo backed Canvas implementation for NodeJS.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 releases, 93 reviews, 215 commits in 9 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Zach primarily focused on improving the `node-canvas` library by refactoring and optimizing code related to the `ImageData` and text drawing features, which are crucial for image manipulation. They replaced deprecated code with `Uint8ClampedArray` to meet specifications, and they refactored code to significantly improve `PutImageData` performance, achieving a 53% speed boost. These changes demonstrate a focus on code efficiency and adherence to web standards.
node-canvascanvasjavascriptnodejsbacked
siimon/prom-client
Sep 2017 - Jan 2022
Prometheus client for node.js
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:3 releases, 60 reviews, 26 commits in 4 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Zach significantly contributed to the `prom-client` project by implementing features related to cluster metric aggregation and improving the performance of gauge metrics. They added functionality to aggregate metrics from cluster workers, ensuring correct behavior in different worker scenarios. Furthermore, the user addressed a critical bug related to cluster mode, ensuring stability. The user also refactored metrics to reduce code duplication.
prometheus-exporternode-jsnodejsprometheusmetrics
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.