# Olsen B.

> Member of Technical Staff @ xAI | Prev ML Platform @ Affirm | MLH Top 50

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/olsen

Software Engineer at Affirm who loves tackling tough problems and building cool things. I’m always curious, always learning, and I enjoy diving into new challenges. Outside of work, you’ll find me exploring tech projects, especially in the world of LLMs, and competing in hackathons. 

Feel free to reach out if you want to connect or chat, also check out the things I've built at https://olsenbudanur.com!

## Work Experience
### Member of Technical Staff @ xAI
Jan 2026 – Present | Palo Alto, CA

### Software Engineer II @ Affirm
Jan 2023 – Jan 2026
ML Infra / Orchestration Infrastructure Team
- Managed and maintained a distributed infrastructure integrating Airflow, Temporal, Spark, and Kubernetes for scalable workflow orchestration with over a 1,000,000 actions a month.
- Developed a high-performance gRPC server in Kotlin, enabling seamless communication with Kubernetes pods managed by Airflow.
- Built a Slack bot leveraging semantic search and LLMs to efficiently resolve triage questions.
- Orchestrated the deployment of the entire team's infrastructure and environments in the UK, ensuring flawless operational continuity.

### AI Infra Consultant @ The Interaction Company of California
Jan 2025 – Jan 2026
- Instrumented tooling for worker profiling inefficiencies: CPU throttling from 70% peak to ~10%.
- Installed KEDA autoscaler, adjusted health checks: worker startup reduced by ~50%.

### Applied AI Consultant @ Cognition
Jan 2024 – Jan 2025
- Led team of 5 engineers to create training data tooling and ~200 LLM evals for Devin AI at Cognition Labs.
- Established a QA rotation and procedure for engineers

*Please do not contact me for “networking calls” to learn more about Devin/Cognition. Thanks!

### Founding Engineer @ Motate LLC
Jan 2022 – Jan 2023
Boutique Software Contracting Firm

- Lead a team of 4
- Secured over 5 contracts for custom software projects
- Achieved a peak quarterly revenue of ~$20,000

### Software Engineer @ Aptos Labs
Jan 2023 – Jan 2023 | Palo Alto, California, United States
(Formerly Meta) Production Engineering Team

- Created a 7,000-line open-source Python CLI for Kubernetes deployments, saving $70,000 w/multithreading.
- Developed a Rust SDK for the CLI, enabling seamless integration to Aptos’s Rust code.
- Designed a horizontally scalable OpenAI chatbot API with Flask real‐time streaming for a responsive UX.

### Founder & President @ Hack@Davidson
Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | Davidson College
Formerly Competitive Coding at Davidson (C-CAD)

- Honorable mention award from the ICPC.
- Founded and coordinated Hack@Davidson 2023, Davidson College’s first student-led hackathon.
- Directed a team of 15 (+90 total members) to accommodate 100+ participants, and raised over $6,000.
- Led the C-CAD’s Hackathon Team, winning a total of 12 categories across 8 Hackathons (1st @ Caltech)

### TA - CSC 352 Blockchains @ Davidson College
Jan 2022 – Jan 2022
Teaching assistant for the inaugural Blockchains class at Davidson

- Graded homework
- Hosted office hours to support students.
- Assisted Dr. Mendes with course administration.

### Software Engineer @ Affirm
Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco, California, United States
Infrastructure Platform Team, Storage & Replication

- Migrated 7 Spark ETLs from an Airflow, Luigi, and AWS EMR stack to an Airflow and AWS Glue stack.
- Decreased the operating costs of 7 Spark ETLs by 80%, and increased their speed by 85%.
- Automated the deployment of 7 Spark ETLs using Python, Terraform, and Buildkite.

### Software Engineer @ Search Technology Inc
Jan 2021 – Jan 2021
Text mining software written in C++

- Created 4 web-UI/GUIs utilizing jQuery and C++ (ran with embedded Chromium).
- Fixed 12 bugs/complaints in Search Technology’s C++ source code.
- Automated and wrote over 500 test cases using JavaScript and Jenkins.

### Team Lead @ Rocketry at Virginia Tech
Jan 2019 – Jan 2020
First lead of the Business & PR team for https://www.rocketryatvirginiatech.org/

- Lead a team of ~5
- Organized outreach events for kids in STEM
- Led designing merch and PR material / logistics


## Education
### Bachelor's degree in Computer Science
Davidson College

### Credits Towards Double Major: B.S. Computer Science in B.S. Computational Modeling & Data Analytics, Minor: Mathematics
Virginia Tech College of Engineering


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/olsenbudanur
- Portfolio: https://olsenbudanur.com/

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Source: https://flows.cv/olsen
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/olsen/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-29