Skip to main content

Dion Whitehead​

Software Engineer/Architect, Data Scientist, ex-Game Developer​

I'm passionate about understanding deep time, complex systems using big data and software, advanced collaboration and team structures, large scale data software architecture, molecular simulation, evolution, biological networks, game development, UX, in roughly that order. Open to collaboration whenever the opportunity presents, as small teams are best positioned for exploration of the unknown.

Currently building complex things for complex teams

Experience​

5 years developing machine learning infrastructure, 2+ years developing cloud-computing infrastructure for scientific applications, 7+ years developing large scale online/social/mobile games and infrastructure, 3 years as post-doc working in the field of computational biology and bioinformatics.

2019-2024​

Senior Software Engineer at Sony AI

  • Building and architecting ML infrastructure and researcher focused tools
  • Full stack: building and architecting backend machinery and front end visualization

2017-2019​

Senior Software Engineer at Cogitai, Inc.

  • Co-designed the technology stack for Cogitai's reinforcement learning APIs.
  • Built from the ground-up, balancing current team abilities with optimal new technology

Technology word salad: golang, python, javascript/typescript/react, terraform, AWS

2014-2017​

Senior Software Engineer at Autodesk Life Sciences (defunct 2018)

NB: My name was Dion Amago back then

Technology stack: Node.js, Javascript, Docker, Redis, AWS Cloudformation, Python, Haxe, React.

2012-2014​

Lead Mobile Engineer at Idle Gaming for "Fresh Deck Poker" [iOS Google Amazon Facebook].

  • Led a small team that published the iOS and Android versions of Fresh Deck Poker in record amount of time without compromising performance, by using the right combination of technology and people.
  • Developed for both the front-end client and the back-end systems, ensuring maximum of performance, development velocity, and long-term maintainability+flexibility in the codebase.

Technology stack: Cross-platform front-end (Cocos2d-x, Objective-C, C++, Java, Lua), mostly Python back-end.

2008 -- 2010​

Software Developer at Three Rings Design, Philadelphia.

  • Prototyped and developed flash social games.

2005 -- 2008​

Postdoc at the Institute of Evolution & Biodiversity, Münster University, Germany.

  • Collaborated with biologists to analyze a large and unique data set, providing unique software tools due to my deep understanding of the data, the statistical methods, and the possibilities of multiple interconnected software packages.

Education​

Open source projects​

Publications​

tip

When I married I changed my name from "Dion John Whitehead" to "Dion John Whitehead Amago", then I got divorced and reversed it back to "Dion John Whitehead"

END PAGE

2001-2004​

PhD student, International NRW Graduate School in Bioinformatics and Genome Research, Bielefeld university, Germany. Built tools for integrating different kinds of databases and tools for visualization of complex data.

Technology: Python, Java, R