Ben Peters
Verified Expert in Engineering
Machine Learning Developer
Ben is a full-stack software engineer specializing in data engineering and analysis. He's studied physics and control theory and has worked on projects ranging from embedded hardware to full-stack web applications to custom machine learning and analytics in Python, JavaScript, and C/C++, among others.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linux, JavaScript, Jupyter, Python, Git
The most amazing...
...project I've worked on was designing a sensor payload to fly on nano-satellites and a platform to allow high school students to run custom experiments in space.
Work Experience
CTO | Co-founder
Ardusat
- Managed and grew an engineering team and architected a web-based platform for inquiry-based learning to teach students STEM skills using computer science and engineering.
- Led the development at the company.
- Recruited and hired team members.
- Established engineering best practices and standards.
- Built a web platform using Ruby on Rails, AngularJS, and Node.js.
- Developed embedded sensor drivers (32 bit ARM Linux) for a satellite sensor board.
- Developed high altitude balloon payloads for remote sensing and telemetry that communicate via 900 Mhz radio and satellite.
Consultant
Subtext, LLC
- Created a semantic-annotation-and-processing pipeline for the automated processing and classification of local news articles and list serve documents using GATE, Groovy, and Python.
- Worked with Ruby on Rails to create interfaces and views to interact with and present this data.
- Developed best practices and guidelines around testing and API development.
Data Science Consultant
Workmans Compensation Fund
- Created predictive models of future fund outlays based on demographics and past spending data.
- Built the company's data infrastructure; using Python, data warehousing using Linux grid compute resources, PostgreSQL, and Apache Spark.
- Created interactive visualizations of important company metrics using D3.js and presented them to the executive team.
Core Product Manager
Artificial Intelligence Quotient
- Created automated trading systems and strategies to compete in the US long/short equity markets.
- Designed and implemented systems in Python, MATLAB, Java, and C to learn and optimize trading models on a 200 computer-node grid.
- Worked extensively with SQL and No-SQL, SunGrid job execution and management, machine learning in Python and MATLAB, high-performance computing in C, and visualization using JavaScript (D3.js), Node.js, and Ruby on Rails.
- Interfaced with NLP data vendors and other third-party APIs.
- Implemented Python and MATLAB modules in C to seamlessly share objects in memory to allow a platform to run a mix of MATLAB and Python code without memory duplication.
Solar and Smart Home Engineer
Heliocentric
- Designed, installed, and maintained smart home controllers and renewable energy systems for high-performance houses including solar (solar thermal and PV), geothermal heat pumps, and small hydroelectric machines.
- Designed and maintained wireless sensor networks using a variety of protocols including ZWave, Xbee, and amateur band (345 and 900 MHz) radio.
- Designed and implemented sophisticated control programs in C and C++ running on 8-bit embedded chips and a 32-bit embedded Debian Linux system.
- Designed and implemented a C++/FastCGI back-end and a jQuery/HTML5 front-end web application to control and monitor home systems and performance.
Experience
Code Sample
The first is a small project that I put together to gather solar data from a home PV system. The code communicates with the solar inverter over an RS232 protocol that is wirelessly connected using XBee radios. I saved this data into a PostgreSQL database with a simple Flask-based API and graphing app to visualize solar data. I included the primary Python classes that implement the protocol. It will not be easy to run it without the full system (including hardware)
The second showcases a few classes from a Flask-based API that I put together to compile Arduino C code asynchronously. It contains a few ORM class definitions and an example of the actual compilation code running on Celery-based task runners.
Skills
Languages
Python, JavaScript, Python 3, Ruby, SQL, C, HTML, CSS, Java, Haskell, C++, Groovy, Scala
Frameworks
Angular, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Django, Flask, Django REST Framework, AngularJS
Libraries/APIs
Scikit-learn, Pandas, Node.js, NumPy, TensorFlow, D3.js, Spark ML, React, Keras
Tools
Gulp, Jupyter, Vim Text Editor, Sublime Text 3, Git, Tableau, RabbitMQ, SaltStack, Digi XBee, MATLAB, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), NGINX
Platforms
Linux, Jupyter Notebook, Red Hat Linux, Debian Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), NVIDIA CUDA
Other
Machine Learning, Z-Wave, Numerical Methods, Embedded Systems, Embedded Controllers, Deep Learning
Storage
PostgreSQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Redis
Paradigms
Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Functional Programming
Education
Bachelor of Engineering Degree in Control Theory (Mechanical Engineering Department)
Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth - Hanover, NH, USA
Bachelor of Arts Degree in Physics, Computer Science
Dartmouth College - Hanover, NH, USA
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring