I develop software and develop people.
Work Experience
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OpenAI
Member of Technical Staff [Jul 2023 – Present]
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AWS Center for Quantum Computing
Head of Software Development [Dec 2020 – Jun 2023]
First software hire and overall software lead for AWS's quantum hardware research division. Grew the software organization from 1 to 15 people, including 7 PhDs, 6 senior engineers, and 50% from underrepresented groups in physics/engineering. Scaled the org into multiple teams, mentoring those with growth potential into L6 technical leadership and management positions.
Co-author of OpenQASM 3: the most widely-used quantum programming language. Facilitated partnership with IBM and Microsoft on open source tooling and language specification.
Delivered multiple high level AWS goals, including automating the calibration of multi-qubit quantum processors, and developing custom control hardware for implementing repetition codes.
“In record time Steven has built a high-performing team and empowered people around him to take quick decisions, make mistakes, and iterate.”
— Director of AWS Center for Quantum Computing -
Airbnb
Software Engineer (L6) [Oct 2019 – Dec 2020]
Managed a team of four software engineers in a hybrid manager / tech lead role. Led migration to a new document storage system, deployed caching systems, and built materialized views with Kafka and Elasticsearch. These initiatives improved performance and saved over $1.5M/year. Also wrote a custom coroutine scheduler in Kotlin to improve performance and throughput of a service which handles 75% of Airbnb's traffic.
“Damn, you're a life saver”
— Software Engineer (L7) at Airbnb -
Rigetti Quantum Computing
Software Engineering Manager [May 2018 – May 2019]
Managed a team of software engineers during a period of high growth, grew team from two to six. Led software engineer hiring: set up hiring process, trained interviewers, and gave final sign off. Author of specialized Python DSL for expressing pulse sequences used in automated device calibration. Scaled Postgres to handle terabytes of experimental physics data. Consolidated all design, measurement, and fab data into a single database. Delivered multiple wins including improving fabrication efficiency, greater visibility into quantum experiments, and orders of magnitude increases to performance
“Steven is the best manager I've ever had.”
— One of my direct reports in a 360 review“Clear, effective, balanced, stable communication. Consistenly makes solid, unrushed decisions.”
— CTO of Rigetti ComputingSenior Software Engineer [Sep 2017 – May 2018]
Led development of Rigetti's first cloud quantum computing product, using Python, React, and GraphQL. Created a highly optimized open-source RPC framework over ZeroMQ.
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LinkedIn
Staff Software Engineer [Dec 2016 – Sep 2017]
Lead engineer on the Enterprise Platform (EP) team. EP provides common functionality such as license management, external integrations, and access control to all enterprise applications at LinkedIn. Rebuilt enterprise search platform from the ground up to use Elasticsearch. This increased maintainability, performance, and led to a 10x decrease in cost. Used Spark to build offline indexes. Led team to migrate Sales Navigator from a legacy system to EP which enabled an 8 figure sales deal. Gave company-wide engineering presentations on functional programming and composition.
“What really sets Steven apart is his ability to analyze and question our fundamental approaches to how we write code at LinkedIn, and explore different ways to increase the productivity of all of our engineers.”
— Senior Staff Engineer at LinkedInSenior Software Engineer [Sep 2015 – Dec 2016]
Worked on LinkedIn Lookup: the fastest way to find, learn about, and contact anyone at your company. Architected the API server using Scala and Play to communicate with the web and mobile apps. Worked with growth and messaging teams to optimize member communications from actions generated by the app using Kafka and Samza for the data pipeline. Maintainer of open source Scala library called Clump which automatically optimizes microservice calls, providing a powerful and composable interface for aggregating resources.
Software Engineer [Sep 2014 – Sep 2015]
Worked on Campaign Manager: a product which advertisers use to manage $400M worth of ads per year. Added key features and refactored inefficient code to create a faster and better user experience.
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Encore
Co-Founder and CTO [Mar 2013 – Aug 2014]
Encore was an iPhone app designed around the memories created at live music shows. Founded this as part of The Next 36 startup accelerator program, which included both venture funding and a subset of MBA classes from the University of Toronto.
The app was eventually shut down but screenshots can still be viewed in the press package.
See also: LinkedIn
Articles & Talks
- Blog: AWS joins the OpenQASM Technical Steering Committee [AWS Blog]
- Talk: Open Quantum Assembly Language
- — PlanQC Conference 2021 [Video]
- — IEEE Quantum Talks [Conference Page]
- Paper: OpenQASM 3 - A broader and deeper quantum assembly language [arXiv 2104.14722]
- Article: Flipping a Coin With a Quantum Computing [Medium]
- Article: Backward vs. Forward Compatibility [Medium]
- Article: Passing Your Senior Engineering Coding Interview [Medium]
- Talk: Controlling a Quantum Computer with Code
- — Index Conference 2018 [YouTube]
- — Python Meetup
- — Rust Meetup [YouTube]
- — University of Waterloo [YouTube]
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Article: Practical Functional Programming [Medium]
2nd most popular software engineering article that day on Medium -
Article: What I learned from doing 1000 code reviews [Medium]
Most popular article that day across all of Medium - Article: A FactoryFactoryFactory in Production [Medium]
- Talk: From Saskatchewan to Silicon Valley — Contact Conference 2016
See also: Medium
Open Source
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Clump
(Scala)
Core contributor to this library for expressive and efficient service composition. Also led the design of the equivalent Java version used across LinkedIn's backend, and another Kotlin version internal to Airbnb. -
OpenQASM
(Python, LaTeX)
Co-author of OpenQASM 3: the most widely-used quantum programming language. This repo contains the source for the paper and a reference parser/AST, along with some other tools. -
Paranormal
(Python)
Paranormal is a declarative parameter parsing library that provides multiple parsing interfaces. I led the design and guided development/integration. -
PyQuil
(Python)
Core contributor to this library for quantum programming. -
RPCQ
(Python, Lisp)
RPCQ is an RPC framework on top of ZeroMQ which is optimized for performant hybrid quantum programming. I was the primary author of the schema and client/server specification.
See also: Github
Book Recommendations
Here are a few good books I've read that I would recommend to others:
- Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. A fantastic work of fiction weaving together six different storylines into a single narrative. David Mitchell is my favorite author; also recommend The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Ghostwritten.
- Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. This is as close to a "life-changing" book as I've ever encountered. It talks about the harms of device overuse on our ability to focus, and includes a guide on how to live more intentionally with less technology.
- Gödel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. A fun read with some puzzles sprinkled in, it also convinced me that intelligent systems can be built from many simple components. (eg. neurons in the brain)
- The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel. A fascinating read about mathematics genius Ramanujan describing his life and his relationship with Hardy amongst the context of British India and pre-WWI Britain.
- A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel. This is the best investing book I've read, written by the now Chief Investment Officer for Wealthfront.
- Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists by Yanofsky and Mannucci. The first book on quantum computing I read, this is still the best option for a gentle introduction for those who come from a computer science background rather than a physics background.
See also: Goodreads