Willem Pienaar
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarWillem Pienaar is a seasoned engineering leader and founder with 11 years of experience building production-grade ML platforms and developer tools. As Co-Founder and CTO of Cleric and former Principal Engineer at Tecton, he co-created and led Feast, the widely used open-source feature store, contributing core testing infrastructure, Python SDK versioning, and automation for reliable deployments. He previously built and scaled Gojek’s ML platform and a 15-engineer team, delivering mission-critical systems for recommendations, pricing, and fraud detection. Based in San Francisco with a strong academic foundation from Georgia Tech and Stellenbosch, he blends hands-on DevOps and ML engineering with product-focused platform strategy. Notably, he bridges OSS stewardship and practical SRE/ML workflows by shipping reproducible test clusters and Terraform-based CI for large-scale feature store deployments.
11 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
21reputation
86reached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (11)
terraformer10
docker10
python10
dockers10
terraform10
cicd10
testing10
bash9
mlops9
kubernetes-helm6
feast6
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
feast-dev/feast
Dec 2018 - Mar 2022
The Open Source Feature Store for AI/ML
Role in this project:
DevOps & ML Engineer
DevOps & ML EngineerContributions:15 releases, 1325 reviews, 783 commits in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Willem contributed significantly to the project by adding a testing folder for infrastructure and running tests, focusing on deploying the testing infrastructure and automating the testing process. They created test infrastructure, including Terraform remote state configuration and config for a testing cluster. The user also contributed to the Python SDK with the CLI configuration command, and implemented a full versioning for the Python SDK, as well as added new files to the core service, and implemented code updates.
aifeature-storemachine-learningmlbig-data
woop/awesome-quantified-self
Aug 2016 - Mar 2021
:bar_chart: Websites, Resources, Devices, Wearables, Applications, and Platforms for Self Tracking
Contributions:6 reviews, 90 commits, 71 PRs in 4 years 8 months
chartquantifiedquantified-selfbar-chartplatforms
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