Dennis Kao
Software Engineer at Whatnot
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDennis Kao is a software engineer with nine years of experience building consumer mobile apps, ML pipelines, and bioinformatics tooling across startups and large tech teams. Currently at Meta, he contributes to the first generation of smart glasses focusing on media creation and ML infrastructure, and previously built high-scale banking UI libraries, Tesla Sentry Mode tooling, and cloud-backed mobile platforms. He blends mobile-first Swift expertise with backend Python, data science tools (pandas, sklearn), and cloud services (GCP, Firebase) to deliver end-to-end products. His bioinformatics work produced multi-threaded RNAseq pipelines used by researchers at Harvard and UCLA and contributed to a published paper, reflecting a knack for translating domain science into production code. Based in Seattle, he pairs a lifelong tinkerer mentality—once editing game packets and selling PCs—with disciplined engineering practices like high-performance computing and reproducible pipelines. Outside work he trains in karate and listens to hip hop, a mix that keeps his problem-solving both focused and creative.
10 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree Computer Science at University of GuelphBayview Secondary School
English, teochow
Github Skills (8)
kana10
in-progress9
windows8
android8
sdl7
text-editor5
sprite4
editor3
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
Detea/PekaSE2
May 2023 - Jun 2024
A modern Pekka Kana 2 sprite editor with lots of nice features
Contributions:3 releases, 1 review, 5 PRs in 1 year 1 month
sprite
Detea/PK2PaletteUtility
Nov 2023 - Apr 2025
A utility that makes editing 256 color bitmaps more accessible!
Contributions:2 releases, 1 PR, 8 pushes in 1 year 5 months
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