Andrew Dirksen

Beaverton, OR
andrew@dirksen.com
(360) 989-0001
github.com/bddap
linkedin.com/in/andrew-dirksen

Generalist software engineer. Writing professional software since 2014, using Rust since 2018. Loves open source. Seeking role as software engineer near Portland, Oregon or remote.

Experience

Open Source

• Refac Apply arbitrary transformations to text via an LLM.
• Webhook Mailbox Receive webhooks without a public ip address or TLS cert.
• Dagyo Run distributed tasks piped together as a DAG.
• Heli A toy you can run now in your browser.
• TryNannou Generates some pretty video.
• Rify Machine reasoning library implemented in Rust.
• Multibase Cli Small command line utility for conversions between multibase encoded data.
• Automata Cellular automaton simulation in your terminal.
• Space Game Cellular automaton in 3D, rendered as voxels.
• Watch STL Display 3D object in native window, update when object is saved to disk.
• Synth My personal “music” generation playground.
• Grin Implementation of Mimblewimble, a privacy preserving blockchain protocol with a novel approach to chain-state minimization.
• Substrate Blockchain framework. Minor contributions.
• Dock Substrate A blockchain.
• More

Senior Software Engineer - PostEra - June 2021 to Present

• Designed and built new systems including a large scale vector search service.
• Owned and maintained a high performance retrosyntesis engine.
• Aided in the hiring process, conducting interviews for software engineering and other roles.
• Composed infrastructure as code and assembled CI/CD as needed.
• Improved internal developer experience.
• Worked with medical chemists on internal drug discovery campaigns and on design of new tooling.
• Worked with ml researchers to productionize their work.

Core Rust Developer - Dock - July 2019 to April 2021

• Worked within a small team to implement and launch the Dock blockchain.
• Submitted and implemented multiple feature proposals including rfc-7, rfc-8, rfc-13, rfc-14, and my personal favorite: rfc-5.
• Created a proof of concept for automatic age verification.

Rust Software Engineer - Layer1 - January 2019 to July 2019

• Primarily contributed to the open source cryptocurrency project Grin.
• Created a prototype REST interface to the Lightning Network.
• Developed and published open source libraries including easy-jsonrpc and pow.
• Developed an AEAD datagram research prototype for use in interactive Grin transactions.
• Developed an experimental library for fast development of cryptographic protocols.

Software QA Engineer - Formaltech - March 2017 to January 2019

• Primarily responsible for QA, CI, integration tests, and release management for a cyber security product. Updated and expanded the suite of automated release tests and implemented the CI/CM process to reduce a multi-week, all-hands manual testing period to sub-week testing period with a small manual component.
• Assembled physical software product build and test lab. Responsible for IT admin and maintenance of lab machines and environment.
• Developed an interactive control and status reporting web dashboard from scratch for sales demos and evaluations of CyberChaff (cyber security product). Completed this effort with a Rust backend serving a React frontend, and a REST API.

Software Engineer / Systems Administrator - Solutional - January 2018 to January 2019

• Took on different roles and responsibilities for internal and external customers of Solutional.
• Individual contributor on software development team for Laravel based SaaS web application for one of Solutional’s clients - Vernaca. Developed aesthetic frontend components from designer mockups. Implemented user workflow interfaces.
• Created foundational tools for Digital Health Collaborative Connectathon Student Event. Tools included a BLE event listener android app, an event database as Azure micro-service, and video documentation.
• Supported maintenance and administration for 11 websites including company properties and client sites.

Software Intern / Software Engineering Associate - Keyssa - May 2014 to March 2017

Started as intern, then hired full-time as engineering associate. Developed tools during internship for physical test automation. Used robot arm to automate intensely time consuming data acquisition. Automation yielded an order of magnitude more useful data. Wrote 3D visualization software for acquired data.

As engineering associate, responsible for developing scientific test automation interfacing with an extensive list of measurement hardware including an 8 DOF robotic arm, spectrum analyzers, and programmable attenuators.

• Documented methods for repeatable results.
• Wrote interactive visualization software for resultant data.
• Built web interface for control of lab hardware and real time data visualization.
• Built custom measurement equipment using 3D printed parts, microcontrollers, and actuators. Required measurement equipment was highly specialized and expensive thus inventing the tools in-house reduced cost significantly.
• Wrote productivity boosting native GUIs for hardware control and testing.

Used C++ and Python for test automation; Python, C++, and JavaScript were used for GUIs and data visualization.

Education

• Associate of General Studies from Portland Community College

Technical Skills

Preferred:

Rust

Knowledgeable:

Python, Git, CSS, HTML, JS, C/C++^[1], Linux, Bash, Java, Lua, Assembly, 3D graphics (native and web), Wgpu, TCP/UDP IP, HTTP, Quic, Noise Protocol Framework, Haskell, Bluetooth/BLE, firmware, SPI, programmatic CAD, robotics, cryptography (use of), native GUIs, SCSS, React, Vue, REST, Websockets, asynchronous programming, Docker, 3D printing, Bitcoin, Lightning, Grin, Blockchain, WebAssembly, Substrate Blockchain Framework, Rescource Description Framework (RDF), Sparql, AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, cheminformatics, RDKit, retrosynthesis, Celery, large scale vector search, ML deployment

[1]: 28 college credits in C/C++ with 4.0 GPA

Fields of Interest - non-exhuastive list

Vulcan (graphics), OpenXR (VR, AR), Zero Knowlege Circuits and Proofs, Machine Learning, Automation, Phoneme-level Human to Machine Interaction, Game Development, Use of Public Keys as Network Addresses, Embedded Development, Data Wrangling and Visualization