Stephanie Suzanne Sohn
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Engineer and Developer
San Diego, CA, United States
Toptal member since December 22, 2025
Stephanie is a senior software engineer with expertise in embedded, parallel processing, and tool development. She held multiple positions writing software related to hardware development, ensuring functionality and improving performance, including artificial intelligence (AI), camera, graphics, high-performance computing (HPC), networking, compression, and encryption. Stephanie's an expert in developing tools and user interfaces for automation, data visualization, and performance analysis.
Portfolio
Experience
- C - 10 years
- Python - 10 years
- Linux - 10 years
- Windows - 8 years
- C++ - 8 years
- Bash Script - 8 years
- Git - 6 years
- Python GUI - 4 years
Preferred Environment
Linux, Windows, Visual Studio Code (VS Code)
The most amazing...
...project I've worked on involved contributing to the end-to-end software development of security cameras.
Work Experience
Senior Software Engineer
Alarm.com Inc
- Developed firmware and software solutions in C/C++ for security IoT camera devices.
- Set up the camera pipeline and retrieved frames from hardware to make video and audio clips (MP4 files) via GStreamer muxing.
- Streamed live camera feeds via RTSP and WebRTC protocols.
- Collaborated with the AI team to enable deep learning processing for on-device detection and identification.
- Developed SD card-related software (JPEG thumbnails, H264 frame handling, MP4 creation).
- Enabled streaming and image settings and tuning (e.g., bitrate, quality, FPS, contrast, saturation).
- Created custom graphic overlays (OSD) on video frames for time-stamping and frame post-processing.
- Implemented REST and JSON APIs to interface camera devices with Alarm.com web back end.
Tools and Automation Infrastructure Software Engineer
Qualcomm
- Automated the testing set up and the data collection of benchmarks (gaming and compute programs written in OpenGL, DirectX, Vulkan, OpenCL) on mobile phone test devices.
- Organized and presented performance data using Python PyQt, Pandas, and Matplotlib libraries.
- Added to the GUI tool a feature to display the file and line number of code matching testing, assisting compiler software engineers with enhanced visualization and tracking.
Software Engineer
EP Analytics
- Constructed specialized tools for performance analysis of high-performance computing (HPC) systems.
- Contributed to binary instrumentation in C/C++, intercepting message passing interface (MPI) and I/O functions.
- Developed Python PyQt GUI, Matplotlib, and Pandas code for presenting performance traces and statistics.
- Automated massive benchmarking for customers in HPC system design for government bidding competition.
Embedded Software Developer
Innoflight
- Developed CUDA code to characterize Nvidia embedded hardware resilience in a high-radiation environment.
- Produced Python scripts to rapidly validate satellite communications hardware for government certification, automating transmission of byte commands and data over sockets and serial communication.
- Investigated Nvidia Linux for Tegra Kernel Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) communication API for internal satellite hardware to act as master over multiple Nvidia core slaves.
System Validation Engineer
Intel
- Validated compression micro-architecture and application apecific integrated circuit (ASIC) of Intel network interface cards (NICs) across simulation, emulation, and hardware systems.
- Implemented C code and microcode to generate test content, configure devices, and evaluate device output against compression software standards.
- Parallelized the AES encryption algorithm using OpenCL, testing on readily available Nvidia GPU acceleration to model for future parallelization implementations on Intel-acquired Altera FPGAs.
- Created a Java Swing GUI front end for an open-source C-based data plane development kit (DPDK) application, enabling a user-friendly interface to interact with low-level network functions.
Experience
Pizza Django Website
https://bitbucket.org/ssohnsd/pizza_orders/Flask Book Ratings
https://bitbucket.org/ssohnsd/book_ratings/src/master/Education
Master's Degree in Computer Science
Portland State University - Portland, Oregon, USA
Master's Degree in Molecular Biology
University of California at Santa Barbara - Santa Barbara, California
Doctorate Degree in Chemistry
University of California at Santa Barbara - Santa Barbara, California
Certifications
OpenCV and Computer Vision
Udemy
OpenGL
Udemy
PyTorch and Deep Learning
Udemy
CUDA
Udemy
Skills
Libraries/APIs
OpenGL, OpenCV, PyTorch, PyQt, Pandas, SQLAlchemy, REST APIs, WebRTC, MPI, NumPy, SciPy, FFmpeg
Tools
Git, CMake, Java GUI, ChemDraw, NVIDIA Jetson, Postman
Languages
C, Python, Embedded C, Embedded C++, C++, Java, Bash Script, SQL, Fortran, Bash
Platforms
Linux, Windows, Embedded Linux, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), NVIDIA CUDA, Heroku
Frameworks
GStreamer, Django, Flask
Paradigms
Agile Software Development, GPGPU, High-performance Computing (HPC)
Storage
PostgreSQL, JSON, ZODB
Other
Firmware, Engineering Software, Data Structures, Embedded Hardware, Embedded Software, 3D Graphics, Malware Analysis, Compilers, Networking, Software Design, Google Colaboratory (Colab), CUDA Kernel, Python GUI, OpenCL/GPU, Computer Science, Biochemistry, Biotechnology, Genomics, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Chromatography, Stoichiometry, Organic Chemistry, Tkinter, H264, JPEG, MP4, RTSP, GC Mass Spectrometry, Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), Artificial Intelligence (AI), GPU Computing, Hardware Development, Memory Management, Software Architecture, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Video & Audio Processing, Video Processing, Embedded Systems, NVIDIA Jetson TK1, Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), User Interface (UI)
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