Armin Samii
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Pittsburgh, United States
Toptal member since October 17, 2022
Armin is the CEO of Dashcam for your Bike, a company building tools to make cycling safer for city cyclists. He also runs RCVis.com, a data visualization website used to display the results of RCV elections throughout the USA. He helped self-driving cars communicate with graphics and visualizations at Argo AI, managing three teams, visualization tools, remote guidance, and UX. Armin is a passionate expert in computer graphics and interactive 3D tools.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
MacOS, Vim Text Editor, C++, C#, Python, Django, Unity, Unity3D
The most amazing...
...thing with RCVis is that it has helped over a million voters understand the results of ranked-choice voting elections and is used by governments across the USA.
Work Experience
CEO
Dashcam for Your Bike
- Launched a pre-revenue company with an app used by thousands worldwide.
- Partnered with municipal governments, creating infrastructural changes to bike lanes throughout Pittsburgh.
- Raised enough funds to hire a part-time employee to help with marketing, outreach, and scaling the product to prove additional traction before seeking investment.
Founder
RCVis.com
- Created a ranked-choice voting election visualization website used by dozens of cities in their official election reporting.
- Developed a website that can handle unexpected spikes of 10,000 times the average number of users in hours when election results are first released.
- Inspired by the data visualization used by New York City's Board of Elections, the website is used as the primary visualization by dozens more cities across the USA.
- Organized in addition to the USA elections, the website hosts ranked-choice voting elections in Ireland from dozens of organizations worldwide and thousands of straw polls held worldwide.
Team Lead and Manager
Argo AI
- Led three separate teams, including incident command system and other managers.
- Built a team from 4 to 14, including advocating for and hiring our first dedicated UX experts.
- Changed hiring practices to improve team diversity, from 0% of folks from underrepresented communities to 40%.
- Created thousands of lines of code in the top 5% of developers regarding features shipped while being a manager.
- Managed over a dozen ad-hoc employees from across the company for specific projects that needed urgent delivery, coordinating the work of the full-time team and the ad-hoc engineers.
Team Lead and Manager
Avametric
- Led teams that built internal software used full-time by 15% of the company and part-time by 50% of the company.
- Planned and led optimizations to the software that led to a tenfold increase in productivity within 12 months of joining, leading to four employees being able to do the work of forty employees.
- Implemented extensive automated end-to-end integration testing of a complex GUI application, removing the need for manual QA before launching software.
Computer Scientist
Adobe
- Launched one of the first mobile photoshop apps, Photoshop Mix, to millions of users.
- Employed as one of the three core engineers on a new app, "Photoshop Fix," which went from MVP to Launch in under a year to millions of users, in dozens of countries, with dozens of languages supported.
- Implemented the first "quick select" tool for mobile apps, which has since become a must-have feature in photo editing apps; we set the standard.
- Implemented the first AI-driven facial editing tool, now commonly seen in Snapchat filters. Using an AI-driven face mesh, built tools to manipulate the mesh.
- Worked with research teams to implement experimental code into production software.
- Built the first in-app customer feedback tool and managed all incoming customer feedback, from bug reports to praise.
Experience
Ranked Choice Voting Visualization Website
https://fairvote.org/how-to-display-rcv-election-results/Dashcam for Your Bike
https://dashcam.bikePittsburgh Bicyclist Hazard Map
https://dashcam.bike/maps/UberCheats
https://www.wired.com/story/gig-workers-gather-data-check-algorithm-math/UberCheats can automatically parse thousands of trips at once, so a user could open their weekly statement and, within seconds, see a list of all trips they were underpaid for. They could then call Uber support, cite each list, and have all the data necessary to get paid correctly.
ARCSim Cloth Simulation Library
http://graphics.berkeley.edu/resources/ARCSim/ARCSim uses finite element simulation with an adaptive triangle mesh: it predicts where the cloth needs more resolution based on several properties, including proximity to a collision, compression, and stretch, and adds that resolution before it is required.
Education
Master's Degree in Computer Science
University of California, Berkeley - Berkeley, California, USA
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
University of California, Santa Cruz - Santa Cruz, California, USA
Skills
Libraries/APIs
D3.js, OpenGL, Node.js, iOS API, Core Graphics
Tools
Vim Text Editor, OpenSceneGraph, MeshLab, Augmented Reality
Languages
C++, Python, C++, C++, Python, C#, C, TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, Objective-C, Swift, GLSL
Frameworks
Qt 5, Qt Development, Django, Unity, Unity
Paradigms
Scrum Master Consulting, Agile Development, Agile Development, Testing
Platforms
Heroku, Mapbox, Firebase, AWS
Other
Computer Science, Computer Graphics, 3D Graphics, Qt 4, Scrum Master Consulting, Agile Sprints, Agile Team Leadership, Technical Design, Technical Design, Lean Project Management, Product Management, Mobile App, Mobile App, App UX, Mobile Apps, UI Development, UX Development, GUI Testing, QA Testing, Unity, Augmented Reality, Clothing, Linear Algebra, Augmented Reality, UX Development, App UI, iOS Camera, iOS, Chrome Extension Development, Finite Element Method (FEM), Mesh Optimization, Game Development, Graphics
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