# Ava Gordon
avagordon01@gmail.com | github.com/avagordon01 Senior software engineer, with 15 years of programming experience, 7 professional. Passionate about high performance, large scale computing. Expertise in C++, Python, Linux, profiling/optimisation (perf, eBPF, tracing), and GPU programming. Experience beyond software development includes team leading, line management, public speaking, technical writing, interviewing and hiring. ## Tower Research Capital, August 2023 - Present, Quantitative Developer I joined the Kailash team, worked with the PM and senior developer, and within four months we were code-ready to go live despite me joining with no prior knowledge of trading. I was developing our C++ risk limiting library, time-series data pipeline (clickhouse/SQL/C++), and planning our kubernetes scaling. ## Hadean Supercomputing, September 2017 - June 2023, Senior Research Engineer Within two weeks of joining this 10 person startup, I started development of Aether (now Simulate) a large scale distributed spatial simulation engine for Gaming, Simulation and Science. Over 5 years later, Hadean was hugely successful with customers and partners in multiple markets including Epic and Microsoft, selling Aether and other products. Hadean had over 100 employees. I was interviewing and onboarding new colleagues. I helped make the software production ready, massively scaled the performance, and developed various profiling tools and methods. I developed great communication skills, writing technical and accessible blog posts for our company blog, mediating technical decisions and building consensus, training and onboarding within the company, external communication in a pre-sales role with partners and investors, collaborating with many disciplines (Technical Pre-Sales, Game Developers, Physicists, Biologists, Engineers, and many Software Engineers). I was usually the person called in to either save projects, or make them successful from the start (tech review / architecture). ## Createc, July 2016, September 2016 - September 2017, Software Developer Spatial data processing, sensor fusion, real-time embedded systems / robotics, machine learning image classification (CNN, Tensorflow, Caffe) on multi-GPU system, embedded computer vision SLAM. ## University of Cambridge, 2:1 Computer Science, October 2013 - June 2016 - Studied courses in Maths, Physics, Machine Learning, Advanced Rendering, Bioinformatics, Comparative (System) Architectures, Computer Vision - Increased performance 25x over the reference implementation of an advanced real-time ray-tracing pipeline for desktop GPUs (C, OpenGL, and GLSL) for my final year project. Optimised the performance with a carefully chosen binary space partitioning tree, like an octree but 64-ary nodes, a stack of parent nodes, and a trick to quickly find the common ancestor node. ## Side Projects - Various C++ open source libraries and utilities - Compiler for a new programming language for writing parallel code on a variety of accelerators (multicore CPUs, SIMD coprocessors and GPUs) LLVM, GLSL, Lex/Flex, Yacc/Bison, C++ - Network visualiser for processes distributed across machines Javascript, D3.js, iproute2 SS - Combined sampling and tracing profiler Python, eBPF, DWARF debug info - 8 bit processor core on an FPGA Verilog, FPGAs - Boot loader in x86 assembly x86 Assembly - Dynamic website with a database backend Go, Javascript, HTML, CSS ## Published Articles - Enhanced sampling of protein conformational states for dynamic cross‐docking within the protein‐protein docking server SwarmDock published in the journal Proteins: Structure, Function, Bioinformatics issue 88 volume 8 - MMORPGs PART 1: It’s time to rethink game architectures - MMORPGs PART 2: Applying data-driven design to optimize computation - Introducing a new Open Source C++ library for Spatial Representations - Hitboxes: Giving Your Game Physicality also re-published in Wireframe Magazine (issue 22, page 30) - Net relevancy and compression: how to push Gbps of gamestate over the internet - Optimisation of Voxel Rendering for Large Scenes on Desktop GPUs ## Interests - skiing - creative coding - electronic music