David G. Quintas

About me

I hail from Gijón, the best city you’ve never heard of. Keep it a secret, that’s just how we like it.

The CERN Days

Summer Student at CERN (Geneva, Switzerland) in 2005, I got my first taste of one of the top most expensive cities in the world. Managed to not generate too many black holes. Kept trying during 2006 and 2007 as a CERN Technical Student, contributing to the software control system used in the LHC. Wrapped it up with a CERN Fellowship until 2010, which gave me time to finish compiling stuff and hang out at the CERN’s Control Center during LHC’s startup on the 10th of September 2008. See if you can spot me.

Crossing the Pond to San Francisco

With that out of the way, I figured out Geneva wasn’t expensive enough. San Francisco would do nicely on that front. I landed in SFO during the summer of 2010 bound for the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (not the super secrety one, that’s in Livermore). My first bike was stolen from BART’s 16th St. Mission station within 2 weeks. Don’t be like David:

Googled

Two years of SF-Berkeley commute on BART allowed me to brush up on a bunch of algorithms and stuff (hash tables, it’s always hash tables). I showed up at the Googleplex’s building 43 one December day in 2011 hoping to have a chat with some Googlers, get some free food and cheat on BART by riding Caltrain for the first time. I ended up getting an offer, as well as a first hand experience with the way visas work, and why October is a special kind of month. And so began a 6+ year stretch at the ‘plex.

The first bit was spent munching cookies with MapReduce and lotsa computers. Then I figured I could try my hand at NLP and teach these knucklehead computers how to read in a bunch of languages. Google is fun, you don’t have to foot the bill of running massive experiements over a gazillion computers. You can see the fruits of my team’s labor every time you search for something on the Google Play Store.

After solving all open problems in NLP, I left the CPUs reading Proust, Cervantes and Goethe and moved on to working on gRPC. Can you see the natural progression from ML/AI to low-level programmming in C89? A straight line. To keep things interesting, I may have, possibly, introduced one or two bugs here and there. Yeah, not by accident at all. It was all for sport.

I’ve been part of Waymo —Google’s self-driving car project— since September 2019, making KITT come to life, for all y’all 80s kids out there.

This resume presents a very condensed version of my professional career. My LinkedIn has all the details.

About This Site

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