Hi, I’m Owen Derby. I’m a staff software engineer.
I like solving problems and fixing things. Whether it’s tracking down a bug or building new services, I’m adept at jumping into a variety of different projects and producing results. While I prefer building backends and architecting systems, I’m not afraid of the occasional JS/HTML/CSS. Currently, I’m really enjoying using Terraform to manage infrastructure resources in code. Detail-oriented and thorough, I take pride in my work.
When I’m not working, I enjoy traveling, playing basketball, and challenging friends to board games. I also care about having a positive impact on our planet and society.
Remix by Via, Berlin, Germany
Staff Engineer
Mar 2021 — Sep 2022
- Rearchitected the travel time analysis tool to leverage OpenStreetMap data, producing significantly more accurate and reliable results for customers, while maintaining average response times.
- Led the launch of the Remix EU region, including capacity planning, customer communications and live data migrations, with zero data loss and no downtime for non EU customers.
Remix, San Francisco, CA
Staff Engineer
Aug 2018 — Mar 2021
- Designed and built a secure environment for ingesting and warehousing sensitive geospatial data, leveraging AWS ECS, RDS, Apache Airflow, and Terraform, for downstream data products.
- Provided organizational leadership by instituting processes for proposing architectural changes, prioritizing technical debt, and managing customer support requests.
Technical Lead
Jul 2017 — Aug 2018
- Researched, tested and implemented a methodology for estimating transit system operating costs in Ruby on Rails backend service for the Transit product.
- Worked closely with product and design to create a product roadmap, ship features, and iterate quickly.
- Implemented a performance benchmarking system to instrument critical user flows, track performance over time and alert on regressions.
Flux Factory Inc., San Francisco, CA
Technical Product Manager
May 2015 — Aug 2016
- Led company through a 4 month pivot to a new SAAS data-interchange product for computational designers.
- Ran goal-setting and implementation for the product, resulting in adoption by thousands of users from a niche market in 6 months.
Software Engineer
Jul 2013 — May 2015
- Designed, built and deployed backend services in Go and associated SQL databases for user data, accounts and Stripe payments.
- Created pipelines for collecting, cleaning, and combining GIS and zoning code data, and Angular components for displaying the result in the Metro product.
- Implemented logical subsystems for a ‘building configurator’ application, while helping re-scope the project mid-contract to deliver a reduced set of features on time.
MIT CSAIL - ALFA Group, Cambridge, MA
Research Assistant
Jun 2012 — May 2013
- Developed FlexGP - a distributed, heterogeneous genetic programming system for machine learning.
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Feb 2011 — May 2011
- Designed and implemented a simple, light-weight genetic programming library in Java.
Jaybridge Robotics - Autonomous Agriculture Group, Cambridge, MA
Software Engineering Intern
May 2011 — Aug 2011
- Contributed to ongoing development of software control package for an autonomous farm tractor.
- Expanded regression tests to exercise new system features and assess improvements in system performance.
NASA AMES - Machine Learning and Controls Lab, Mountain View, CA
MCT Intern at NASA Ames Research Center
May 2010 — Aug 2010
- Expanded control software on lab test bed to incorporate acceleration measurements.
- Implemented a simple fault detection and isolation algorithm to demonstrate system capabilities.
iRobot Corporation - iRobot 710 Warrior, Bedford, MA
Software Engineering Intern
Jun 2009 — Aug 2009
- Programmed a component to setup streams with onboard A/V driver for remote control over radio.
- Designed and tested a logging application for real-time viewing and debugging of runtime data.
Programming Languages: Python, Ruby, TypeScript, JavaScript, Go
Software & Tools: git, CircleCI, Mixpanel/GA, Jira, gerrit
Deployment & DBs: AWS, Postgres, Terraform, Docker, GCS
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Masters of Engineering in Computer Science
June 2013
Bachelors of Science in Computer Science and Engineering
June 2012
Relevant Coursework: Machine Learning, Distributed Systems, Computer Systems Security, Performance Engineering of Software Systems, Design and Analysis of Algorithms
- Board Games
- Ping Pong
- Cooking
- Soccer
- Exploring new cities
- Robotics
- Basketball
FlexGP: Cloud-Based Ensemble Learning with Genetic Programming for Large Regression Problems
in Journal of Grid Computing 2015
Describes FlexGP, the first Genetic Programming system to perform symbolic regression on large-scale datasets on the cloud via massive data-parallel ensemble learning.
Learning Regression Ensembles with Genetic Programming at Scale
in Proceedings of GECCO 2013
Examines the challenge of producing ensembles of regression models for large datasets.
Cloud Driven Design of a Distributed Genetic Programming Platform
in Proceedings of EvoApplications 2013
Presents FlexGP, a distributed genetic programming (GP) system designed to efficiently run on the cloud.