Benoit Steiner http://bsteiner.info/resume.html

Meta (Online social services)

Senior Staff Research Engineer, FAIR (Menlo Park, CA)

• Demonstrated how to reduce the memory needed to train neural networks by 30 to 90%, and worked with several teams to deploy the solution in production.
• Prototyped a neural network compiler driven by reinforcement learning that delivered an average performance gain of 5x over PyTorch.
• As area lead, defined the overall strategy and priorities for the systems research group.

Google (Internet related services and products)

Staff Software Engineer, Google Brain (Mountain View, CA)

• Led the development of Grappler, a toolbox of graph optimizations combining abstract interpretation of models with heuristics based graph rewrites and machine learning based combinatorial optimizations to improve the performance of TensorFlow by 12 to 50%.
• Envisioned, designed, and led the implementation of the high performance framework for numerical computing upon which TensorFlow was written. Several other teams also adopted the framework for applications such as image processing, recommendation engines, and text understanding.
• More than doubled the speed and scalability of the DistBelief machine learning engine, the precursor to TensorFlow. This resulted in annual savings exceeding $100 million.

Software Engineer, StreetView (Mountain View, CA)

• Trained a neural network capable of detecting license plates in the StreetView imagery with more than 99.9% accuracy.
• Redesigned and reimplemented the pipeline used to blur license plates and faces in StreetView imagery.

Coverity (Source code analysis and verification)

Architect, New Product Initiative (San Francisco, CA)

• Spearheaded the design and implementation of a new product aiming to prove the correctness of safety critical applications written in C or C++.
• Developed the first prototypes and used them as vehicles for demonstrations. Leveraged off-the-shelf solutions such as Mahout for quick experiments.
• Wrote the functional specification for the final product and participated in its implementation.
• Managed the relationship with the project external partner in Japan.

Tabula (Programmable logic design)

Technical Lead and Senior Software Manager, Infrastructure (Santa Clara, CA)

• Led and grew a team developing the infrastructure software used to program the company's semiconductor chips (code generators, device and design databases, bit stream generator, timing analysis engines, clock router, and so on).
• Pioneered the use of contractors located in Eastern Europe as a flexible and cost efficient way to increase the engineering bandwidth when needed.
• Tackled cross functional projects such as reducing the power consumption of the chip, optimizing the memory footprint of the software, or leveraging distributed computing to speed up the generation of chip models.
• Personally designed and implemented an innovative approach to compute the maximum frequency at which the chip can operate.

Magma Design Automation (Software tools for semiconductor design)

Senior Manager, Formal Verification (San Jose, CA)

• Led the development of a tool that automatically detects several classes of bugs in a semiconductor design.
• Started the project from the ground up. Assembled, trained and coached a small but highly technical team. Worked with the marketing department and potential customers to define the initial requirements and roadmap.
• Acted as architect, technical lead and individual contributor. Conceived the overall architecture including the custom high performance database. Designed and implemented the property checking engine that formed the heart of the tool.

Senior Manager, Timing Analysis (Santa Clara, CA)

• Managed an international team of more than 15 people responsible for the incremental timing analysis engine used to predict the frequency at which semiconductor chips operate.
• Led major new developments: rewrote the tool to leverage multiple CPUs for speed, made use of statistical models to capture the electrical variability of the transistors, etc.
• Incrementally increased the tool accuracy and expanded its reporting capabilities. Held brainstorming sessions to identify technical solutions, scheduled their implementation, drove (and often personally tackled) the development, and ensured final customer adoption by integrating the feedback received during early beta testing engagements.
• Continuously improved the overall quality of the tool: decreased the runtime by up to 4 orders of magnitude on some very large designs, dramatically reduced the bug filing rate, fixed several design flaws, enforced more stringent code reviews, etc.

Monterey Design Systems (CAD software for semiconductor design)

Technical Lead, R&D (Mountain View, CA)

• Began in September 2000 as an intern; hired as a software developer in July 2001. Became the technical lead of the timing analysis team in 2003.
• Increased the scalability of the timing analysis tool by reducing the computational complexity of several algorithms and by leveraging up to 32 threads to perform the computations. Designed and developed capabilities required to take into account the impact of manufacturing process variations on the performance of the chip.
• Trained team members and helped them develop solutions to existing problems and dramatically reduce the memory footprint of the tool.

Ensim (Internet infrastructure solutions for hosting providers)

Intern, Internet Application Network division (Sunnyvale, CA)

• Designed, developed and debugged software for managing licensing and billing.
• Adapted HP's OpenMail mail server to Ensim's "hosting ready" platform.

Mycom International (GSM network design and monitoring)

Intern, software development division (London, UK)

• Developed a powerful HTML generator and a web-based software interface.
• Improved the speed and robustness of the database connectivity engine.

Peregrine Systems (Corporate asset and infrastructure management)

Intern, product development department (Bourg La Reine, France)

• Developed an SNMP agent used for remote resource management.