Donghee Na
Lead ML Infrastructure Software Development Engineer at Python Software Foundation
Seoul, South Korea
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDonghee Na is a Lead ML Infrastructure Software Development Engineer based in Seoul with 12 years of experience building scalable, production-grade backend systems and ML platforms. A long-time CPython core developer and 2025 Python Steering Council member, he brings deep language-level expertise from contributions across CPython, RustPython and Go-based Python interpreters. He has driven large-scale backend work at Karrot, LINE and Kakao—optimizing databases, designing cross-language interfaces and migrating critical data pipelines—while also contributing to notable open-source projects like coala and pyperf. Comfortable across languages and runtimes, Donghee frequently tackles low-level correctness and performance issues (memory leaks, interpreter builtins, locale and encoding edge cases) that most engineers don’t see. He pairs leadership in infrastructure delivery with hands-on craftsmanship in language internals, making him particularly effective at productionizing ML tooling.
12 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Computer Science and Engineering, Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Computer Science and Engineering at Chungnam National University
Github Skills (35)
cpython10
debugging10
benchmark10
lib10
python10
testing10
text-manipulation10
benchmarking10
c-programming10
interpreter10
cffi10
lang10
go10
golang10
performance-tuning10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
google/grumpy
Feb 2017 - Nov 2017
Grumpy is a Python to Go source code transcompiler and runtime.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:18 commits, 22 PRs, 87 comments in 9 months
Contributions summary:Donghee implemented new functionalities within the Grumpy Python-to-Go transcompiler and runtime environment. These contributions included the implementation of Python string methods like `swapcase()`, `isalpha()`, `isdigit()`, `isspace()`, `isupper()`, `islower()`, `istitle()`, and added support for the `ellipsis` type. The user also refactored the print function to utilize *grumpy.File and incorporated the raw_input function. Finally, the user added the float and complex hash function.
gopython
python/cpython
Apr 2017 - Jan 2023
The Python programming language
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1684 reviews, 74 commits, 1460 PRs in 5 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Donghee primarily contributed to the Python standard library (cpython repository), addressing bugs and implementing optimizations related to core functionalities. Their commits focused on improving performance and resolving issues within the `_decimal`, `_json`, `_sqlite`, `_weakref`, `_bisect`, `_operator`, `_lzma`, and `_xmlrpc` modules. The user's work also included fixing memory leaks, correcting error messages, enhancing documentation, and adding new features to the library.
programming-languagepython
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