I come into work. My goal is to make a binary I’ve been working on use less memory. It’s been using 2 GB for no reason! Realistically though, what I do is a big question mark.

As an Algo Engineer, I’m an individual contributor who notices things to improve and gets them done. If I see every team is writing custom hacky scripts to the same thing, I’m on it! If we’re running a billion instances of a program, I’ll make it faster!

Lately I’ve been “embedded” on a specific Algo team which means I help them vs. everybody in Algo. They’ve been doing a data analysis workflow in pandas but their scale got too big, so they need an alternative. I’ve been prototyping different solutions for them.

I walk downstairs to grab a drink from our amazingly stocked refrigerator. Artisan cold pressed juice. Other HRTer’s are hanging out and I jump in. Did you see that weird bug? Have any of you used ElasticSearch? Have you noticed that the air pressure is different in the stairwell whenever it rains?

Back at my desk, I get in the zone for a couple hours until I get tapped on my shoulder. “Hey David, I want to design this new thing, can we white board it?” Happy to help!

I find the memory leak in my script, and put up my change for code review. Nice! As I celebrate at my desk I get an ominous email. “Hey no rush, but our jobs are acting weird in our distributed computing cluster. They’re failing, but only on Tuesdays.” Well, I know what I’m doing this week!

Apply to join the team here.