Will Fitzgerald
Adjunct Faculty at GitHub
Kalamazoo, Michigan, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWill Fitzgerald is an experienced machine learning and data engineer with 17 years building NLP, search, recommendation, privacy, and trust-and-safety systems across academia, research labs, and large platforms. He has led production ML efforts at GitHub to combat abuse at scale, improved search relevance at the Internet Archive, and guided NLP and recommendation teams at Wordnik and earlier startups. A PhD-trained AI researcher, he blends deep research chops with pragmatic engineering—authoring data loaders and scrapers for epidemiological modeling and contributing optimized Go libraries for bitsets and Bloom filters used by projects like Milvus. Will teaches as adjunct faculty in Kalamazoo while advising the Wordnik Society, reflecting a commitment to mentorship and open lexical resources. Known for refactoring for performance and robust testing, he pairs systems-level thinking with hands-on code improvements that make models and pipelines reliable in production.
17 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Arts - MA, Master of Arts - MA at Southern Illinois University, CarbondaleDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Artificial Intelligence, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Artificial Intelligence at Northwestern UniversityBachelor of Arts - BA, Linguistics, Bachelor of Arts - BA, Linguistics at Michigan State University
Stackoverflow
1,372reputation
334kreached
25answers
3questions
mongodb
top-5%
Github Skills (28)
algorithm10
algorithms10
data-pipelines10
python10
pandas10
bloom-filter10
etl-process10
data-structure10
vi10
data-loading10
go10
data-scraping10
data-structures10
data-pipeline10
co10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
bits-and-blooms/bitset
May 2011 - Jul 2020
Go package implementing bitsets
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 117 commits, 26 PRs in 9 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Will contributed to the development of a Go package implementing bitsets. Their primary contributions include improving existing methods like `ClearBit`, introducing new functionalities such as the `Size` and `Count` methods, and refactoring the code for performance improvements using bit shift operations. Additionally, the user made several improvements to the test suite, enhancing the robustness of the package. Moreover, the user refactored the code to use more efficient bit manipulation techniques and improved the clarity and maintainability of the codebase.
go-packagesbitsetgo
bits-and-blooms/bloom
May 2011 - Feb 2019
Go package implementing Bloom filters, used by many important systems
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 44 commits, 16 PRs in 7 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Will primarily contributed to the development and maintenance of a Go package implementing Bloom filters. They added new functionality, specifically an estimator to calculate parameters, and integrated it into testing benchmarks. The user refactored the code by updating the copyright, removing the Makefile, and making the necessary format changes for compilation. Further contributions included improvements to testing and additions to testing code.
bloom-filtergo-packagesbloombloom-filtersgo
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