Alan is available for hire
Hire AlanAlan Sammarone
Verified Expert in Engineering
Machine Learning Developer
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Toptal member since March 28, 2017
Bio
Alan is an innovative research and machine learning engineer with over a decade of experience idealizing, researching, building, and deploying machine learning applications. He excels in fast-paced startup environments and drives cutting-edge AI/ML solutions from concept to deployment.
Portfolio
Enza Zaden
Python, Azure, PyTorch, JAX, Computer Vision, Spectroscopy, Terraform
Nav
Python, Kubernetes, JAX, PyTorch, Apache Kafka
Tillful
Python, PyTorch, Kubernetes, Machine Learning, PostgreSQL, Apache Kafka
Experience
- Python - 12 years
- Linux - 10 years
- PostgreSQL - 10 years
- Machine Learning - 6 years
- PyTorch - 5 years
- Kubernetes - 4 years
- Apache Kafka - 3 years
- Terraform - 2 years
Availability
Part-time
Preferred Environment
Python
The most amazing...
...thing I've built and deployed was an ML system combining several cutting-edge techniques, such as weak supervision and latent space anchoring.
Work Experience
Lead Machine Learning Engineer
2024 - PRESENT
Enza Zaden
- Built a team of ML engineers and data scientists aimed at being the core group responsible for guiding the company through a data-driven transformation phase.
- Collaborated with the data science, biology, bioinformatics, and robotics teams to improve the ML solution lifecycle management.
- Worked with business stakeholders to define the company's machine learning strategy for the next 3-5 years and build the core infrastructure and tooling used by multiple R&D and operations teams within the company.
Technologies: Python, Azure, PyTorch, JAX, Computer Vision, Spectroscopy, Terraform
Principal Machine Learning Engineer
2023 - 2024
Nav
- Designed and led a team implementing the company-wide software infrastructure aimed at serving various machine learning models at scale with real-time inferences using an event-based architecture with Kafka.
- Collaborated with technical and product stakeholders to create and implement a migration from nightly batch jobs to real-time processing with Kafka. This ultimately led to features being available to end users much faster and reduced customer churn.
- Migrated the acquisition IP to the company's infrastructure.
Technologies: Python, Kubernetes, JAX, PyTorch, Apache Kafka
Senior Machine Learning Engineer
2018 - 2023
Tillful
- Transformed a proof-of-concept into a fully functional, production-ready financial transaction categorization engine, employing natural language processing, time series analysis, and weak supervision techniques.
- Designed and implemented the production-ready machine learning pipeline for a pre-incident model used by one of Europe's largest banks. The pipeline is capable of handling close to 1TB at every run and utilizes Spark, Kubeflow Pipelines, XGBoost, and Kubernetes.
- Collaborated closely with research scientists, software engineers, architects, and stakeholders to design and implement multiple machine learning solutions aimed at serving machine learning models at scale to Fortune 500 companies.
Technologies: Python, PyTorch, Kubernetes, Machine Learning, PostgreSQL, Apache Kafka
Senior Developer
2014 - 2017
Simbiose Ventures
- Created a machine-learning pipeline as well as a REST API to access it, which was able to categorize websites according to their contents.
- Optimized various parts of the company's system, generating a 5 to 10-fold performance improvement and decreased costs.
- Migrated the company's storage architecture to a hybrid of Amazon Glacier and Amazon S3, decreasing storage costs by 30%.
- Idealized and oversaw the creation of a system for extracting product prices for any given URL representing a product listing.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon, C, Aerospike, Elasticsearch, Python
Software Developer
2012 - 2014
Positivo Informática
- Coded highly optimized, browser-based mathematical and physical simulations aimed at helping teaching high school children visualize concepts.
- Wrote an automation tool used to update and deploy thousands of applications efficiently.
- Optimized many legacy JavaScript projects to make them run on low-end tablets.
Technologies: Python
Junior Developer
2010 - 2012
Aymará Editora
- Coded and supported a social network aimed at children.
- Wrote JavaScript animations and games for tablets.
- Created a framework to sync information from different databases.
Technologies: PHP
Junior Developer
2009 - 2010
Totalize Internet Studio
- Created websites for to small and medium-sized business using a proprietary framework.
Technologies: PHP
Experience
Transaction Categorization Engine
https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18430A complete model training and deployment pipeline for a system capable of categorizing bank transactions using weak supervision, natural language processing, and deep neural network techniques. Our approach minimizes the reliance on expensive and difficult-to-obtain manual annotations by leveraging heuristics and domain knowledge to train accurate transaction classifiers.
Education
2022 - 2024
Master's Degree in Theoretical Physics
University of Amsterdam - Amsterdam
2020 - 2022
Master's Degree in Computational Science
University of Amsterdam - Amsterdam
2016 - 2019
Bachelor's Degree in Physics
Universität Leipzig - Leipzig, Germany
Skills
Libraries/APIs
PyTorch, NumPy, SciPy, JAX
Tools
Git, Terraform
Languages
Python, PHP, C
Storage
PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Aerospike
Platforms
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, Apache Kafka, Amazon, Linux, Azure
Frameworks
Django
Other
Machine Learning, Mathematical Analysis, Apache Cassandra, Neural Networks, Physics, Computer Vision, Spectroscopy
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