# Palmer Lao > Software engineer Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/palmer ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Google Jan 2022 – Present | Sunnyvale, California, United States ### Staff Software Engineer @ Formation Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 - Designed, implemented, and maintained multiple components for the distributed multi-tenant offer execution product - Designed and built new customer integrations to the product and migrated existing customers from a legacy platform - Created and maintained internal core libraries focused on safety and operational observability - Shifted tech stacks and performed large migrations to improve operational reliability and performance where necessary - Extended internal deployment tooling for AWS Lambda; used by multiple teams at Formation to deploy dozens of Lambdas on branch and master commits - Gave demos and led knowledge sharing sessions for the engineering org on topics including Hadoop Streaming; packaging with Bazel; observability with AWS Lambda, CloudWatch, and Honeycomb; and development loop efficiency ### Senior Software Engineer @ Formation Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 ### Senior Machine Learning Engineer @ Formation Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 - Productionized a hyperparameter search and analysis pipeline for Vowpal Wabbit (VW). The improved pipeline robustly automated what was a manual and flaky weekly task for data science, increased speed 3x, and decreased storage costs 20-80x - Prototyped a model server integrating Tensorflow Serving and VW - Debugged and found bottlenecks in legacy mail send system to improve send rates and engagement - Took over, enhanced, and stabilized a daily measurement job, assisting with offboarding a group of consultants ### Machine Learning Engineer @ Formation Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area ### Research Assistant @ Columbia Business School Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 Optimized and created new Python scripts to combine datasets using string distance and other heuristics Experimented with memory mapping in R for matching large datasets ### Research Assistant @ Clarkson University Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Potsdam, NY Wrote scripts in Python to clean a new dataset of computer keyboard inputs logged during regular use Created and implemented a probabilistic model to identify users based on typing rhythms Worked on creating a more abstract framework to unify similarities in other models ### Differential Equations Teaching Assistant @ Clarkson University Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 | Potsdam, NY Held weekly recitations to reinforce ideas from lecture Administered and graded quizzes and projects ### Undergraduate Researcher @ Clarkson University Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 Modeled biological network data using systems of linear ODEs Presented poster at school-level undergraduate research conference Implemented various numerical methods for ordinary and partial differential equations in MATLAB Worked on a DARPA-funded multifactor authentication project Translated benchmark algorithms from MATLAB to R Improved an existing multifactor authentication algorithm by moving factor fusion from the decision level to the sensor level Learned about and implemented Monte Carlo and Markov Chain Monte Carlo samplers in MATLAB ### Undergraduate Researcher @ Illinois Institute of Technology Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 Proposed and implemented (in MATLAB) a method to mitigate the instability of a common computation that arises while solving partial differential equations with kernel methods Empirically improved stability (conditioning) by several orders of magnitude at the cost of relatively small error gains ### Undergraduate Researcher @ Duke University Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 Learned inference algorithms for Markov Chains, Hidden Markov Models, Gaussian Mixture Models, and Dynamic Bayesian Networks with applications in social class ranking and gene regulatory network inference Employed Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques for Bayesian analysis ## Education ### Master's Degree in Statistics Columbia University ### Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science Clarkson University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/palmerlao - Website: https://angel.co/palmerlao - Website: http://github.com/palmerlao --- Source: https://flows.cv/palmer JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/palmer/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-05