Resume

Jamal Sinclair O'Garro

Specialties: Electronic Trading, Algorithmic Trading, System Design, Project Management, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Node.js, Kotlin, Java

GitHub | LinkedIn

Professional Experience

Netflix, Data Science and Engineering, New York, NY (Remote)

Senior Software Engineer (L5), April 2024 – Present

Full-stack senior software engineer working on analysis solutions for Netflix's Experimentation Platform Analysis team in the Data Science and Engineering organization.

  • Work with data scientists and Netflix software engineers to gather requirements and develop new features and functionality that will improve the A/B testing infrastructure as it pertains to the analysis side of the stack
  • Leading the cross-functional Global Real-time Guardrails initiative that spans several organizations, departments, and teams to add real-time guardrail calculations and alerts to identify experiments that may adversely impact Netflix users, with an emphasis on Live and Ads safety
  • Adding several key features to the ABlaze experimentation/testing platform to allow Netflix data scientists to analyze experiment results more effectively (e.g., Observation Window Selector, Feature Stacks Selector, Experiment Management Tool, Real-time Statistical Guardrails Controls)
  • Building a global notifications system for the experimentation platform, built on top of Temporal workflows
  • Worked with Infrastructure Engineering's LLM team to integrate large language model capabilities into experimentation guardrails report summaries, now in production
  • Member of the GenAI Data Task Force and GenAI for Experimentation working groups, exploring opportunities to embed artificial intelligence into Netflix systems and workflows
  • Partner lead for the team's relationship with the Live and Member Data Science & Engineering teams
  • Co-chair of the Netflix Platform Engineering User Interface (PE UI) Roundtable, which sets the direction for new paved-road JavaScript technologies at Netflix
  • Act as Informed Captain on "Medium Rocks" initiatives to ensure critical housekeeping items like migrations, dependency upgrades, and audit compliance did not fall through the cracks during various quarters
  • Developing new GraphQL queries and mutations as part of a more significant effort to migrate our REST endpoints to one of the most significant production GraphQL implementations

Netflix, Infrastructure/Platform Engineering, New York, NY (Remote)

Senior Software Engineer (L5), May 2022 – April 2024

Full-stack senior software engineer working on platform engineering solutions within Netflix's Platform Engineering team's streaming division.

  • Write proposals for crucial software engineering projects and improvements that can be made to the system
  • Created the architectural design for the Deployment Orchestration Component, which initiates production application deployments, keeps track of their state, and emits events to other components when deployments are complete or fail to complete
  • Build big data pipelines with Python, Spark, and Hive that analyzed critical success and product metrics for Platform Engineering and displayed the results in Tableau dashboards that refresh after each daily run
  • Led the Managed Delivery Migration virtual team effort to use data to understand and drive the adoption of our flagship delivery tool
  • Used Python and Pandas to create monthly and quarterly Adoption Metrics reporting to help senior leadership understand how our customers use applications by extracting data from several databases. Several teams use this platform to track key product and success metrics, which senior executives use to make strategic decisions.
  • Worked with product management and staff software engineers to agree on standards to determine if applications are active, inactive, or zombie as part of a broader project that aimed to help us better understand our data
  • Work with staff engineers to write a proposal on tracking data that can be used to analyze the health and usage of Netflix's critical systems
  • Led the effort to remove inactive application deployments from Netflix systems and automate the process
  • Designed and developed a feature of one of our flagship applications that exposes the ability to analyze historical application deployments
  • Performed cross-functional work to organize engineers to think about improving the user experience of applications used by our key stakeholders
  • Member of the Netflix Python Squad tasked with supporting the Python infrastructure used at Netflix
  • Member of the Netflix Engineering interview committee that interviews senior engineers, new graduate engineers, and interns
  • Represented Netflix as a panelist on three Netflix "career day" events held in partnership with local non-profits and high schools
  • Created a large language model that dynamically queries internal databases and produces data visualizations when asked about data internal to Netflix and presented it at the annual Netflix Machine Learning Hackathon

Citadel Securities, ETF Market Making, New York, NY

Software Engineer, December 2018 – May 2022

Work directly with the heads of ETF Market Making Trading and ETF Market Making Technology to plan and build new data-driven applications to add to our global electronic trading suite.

  • Oversaw the development of the desk's desktop manual/semi-systematic trading suite that held up without outages or performance issues during the historic COVID-19 crash of 2020 and was eventually rolled out firm-wide
  • Oversaw the building of an application that monitors several markets for anomalies and notifies traders of buy and sell signals in real-time. This has contributed to several million dollars in additional PnL for the firm since its launch.
  • Oversaw the development of an RFQ responder that deprecated three separate applications by subscribing to multiple data feeds containing requests for quotes and real-time market and fair value quotes from our quoters and pricing vendors. This allows traders to respond more efficiently to requests across multiple quote sources in real-time and has a significant positive impact on PnL. This system has since been rolled out to the entire firm and used to handle all of the firm's RFQ activity.
  • Architected and managed the development of ModelServer, which allows traders and quant researchers to quickly take a model generated in a Jupyter notebook and expose a REST endpoint that any trading application can run via remote execution
  • Designed and led the development effort of Cranium, a desktop application that our traders use to reconcile trades and submit orders as part of our daily ETF creation and redemption process. This is now the primary tool used by the firm to handle our daily ETF create/redeem process.
  • Authored a Python library that allows traders and quant researchers to review real-time and historical data from KDB using Python and Jupyter Notebooks
  • Architected and oversaw the development and deployment of the JupyterDash interactive dashboard framework to make it easy for engineers, quants, and traders to create interactive data visualizations of their model results
  • Conceptualized and managed the rollout of an improved SDLC and release process for the business' desktop electronic trading applications
  • Coordinate releases and communicate to the heads of trading and COO to ensure clean production releases that have never required rollbacks
  • Managed the effort to replace the backend of our primary trading applications to retrieve data from KDB+
  • Managed the effort to roll out the firm's Point real-time data grids to the ETF desk, which contributed significantly to PnL
  • Led the effort to improve the desk's basket uploader system that allows traders to upload custom baskets for use in our algorithmic trading systems
  • Managed the roll-out of our real-time reporting suite that allows traders to view and process real-time news alerts and analyze real-time PnL from our streaming big data platform
  • Implemented a "ready for business" checkout system that ensures that all critical systems are up and running before the market open
  • Managed the delivery of the first web-based (OpenFin, React, Node.js) applications used by our ETF Trading desks and the Firm as a whole to migrate from .NET to an Electron-based system
  • Conceptualized and engineered a basis charting tool that allows traders to compare the spread between market prices and our calculated fair values intraday, as well as analyze trends in spread movement over several hours, days, weeks, and months
  • Products Delivered: RFQ Responder, Basis Charter, ModelServer, PnL Charter, Cranium, Point Data Blotters, JupyterDash, KDB+ integrations

Columbia University, Columbia Engineering Coding Bootcamp, New York, NY

Instructor, January 2019 – July 2019

  • Instructor teaching computer science and web development with modern tools such as React, Node.js, MySQL, MongoDB, and Express.js in the Fu Foundation of Engineering's part-time web development program
  • Help develop and improve the web development curriculum so topics and technologies taught in the program follow industry trends
  • Earned the highest instructor ratings ever recorded for the web development course since its inception
  • Provided additional lectures that taught the fundamentals of functional programming and machine learning with Node.js and Python

Citadel LLC, Global Commodities, New York, NY

Software Engineer, March 2016 – November 2018

Software engineer designing, architecting, and building software for the front office of a global trading business with a focus on delivering electronic trading, backtesting, and data visualization systems written in Python and Node.js.

  • Designed and developed the order entry application, which is now used by the entire firm. This tool executes live market orders and allows traders to specify trading algorithms to use when slicing orders to the market.
  • Performed development work on a product grid that is used to display real-time market quotes for multiple products across several exchanges
  • Coordinated trading system releases to development, stable development, and production environments
  • Automated daily reports for traders, analysts, and portfolio managers by writing Python scripts
  • Built and deployed an interactive tree map that displays trends in real-time business data using D3.js and a Flask backend
  • Developed a Python data visualization library that allows traders and analysts to build interactive charts and real-time dashboards with as little as three lines of code
  • Architected and oversaw the development of a database explorer and management tool used by the desk to explore, edit, and export data across all of our databases
  • Architected and designed the web infrastructure for several businesses, which included selecting all frameworks, tooling, testing, and implementing the continuous integration build for all desks in our division
  • Member of the firm's Node.js owners committee that oversees the firm's adoption of Node and its implementation into critical trading systems
  • Products Delivered: Order Entry, Product Grid, Price Override, Order Blotter, Backtest Explorer, Real-time Model Run Dashboard, Real-time Alert Heat Map (used firm-wide), Real-time Cash Balances Dashboard, Symphony Messenger module/REST API and chatbot, Content Viewer

New Jersey Institute of Technology, Art of Code Program, Newark, NJ

Instructor, January 2017 – December 2018

  • Worked with the mayor's office, governor's office, and Code for America to develop a program to be used to train workers from the Newark location
  • Lectured on topics ranging from front-end web development to backend web development and databases
  • Developed the curriculum that was used in the program
  • Open-sourced the curriculum so that other academic institutions could use it

Morgan Stanley, Client Financing Analytics, New York, NY

Lead Developer, April 2015 – March 2016

  • Contributed to building a large-scale enterprise risk management application that is used to make critical business decisions by the Firm's front-office business and its clients
  • Ran a global team of five developers spread across several offices when our VP of engineering was out on leave for several months
  • Trained other teams in the Firm on AngularJS, JavaScript, and TypeScript best practices
  • Performed code reviews/merged pull requests before code was deployed into a live production environment
  • Invited to represent our team at the prestigious Morgan Stanley Global Tech Expo when our application was selected for exhibition

Goldman Sachs & Co., Clarient Entity Hub, New York, NY

Lead Developer, August 2014 – April 2015

  • Lead Node/JavaScript developer on a project led by Goldman, DTCC, and a consortium of banks for a counterparty onboarding and management platform, which was purchased by Thomson Reuters shortly after it was spun off into its own company
  • Worked closely with Goldman's product management team to understand business problems and develop features that would resolve them
  • Developed business-critical features that were used by the Firm's clients, including user onboarding, dynamic report creation, and charting flows
  • Was in charge of reviewing code, setting our continuous delivery pipeline, and coordinating production releases

Education

Harvard Business Analytics Program — Harvard Business School, Boston, MA

Graduate Certification in Business Analytics | Graduated with Distinction

  • Graduation/Commencement Speaker
  • Coursework: Foundations of Quantitative Analysis, Programming and Data Systems, Data Science Pipeline and Critical Thinking, Data-Driven Marketing
  • Activities: DataMinds Student Club (organizer), HBAP UMOJA Student Club (organizer), Student Ambassador Program (program ambassador)

The Pennsylvania State University — Schreyer Honors College, University Park, PA

Bachelor of Science in Economics with a minor in Business | GPA: 3.60/4.0

  • Lion's Shrine Award Recipient — awarded to the student with the highest GPA in his or her undergraduate college
  • Schreyer Honors Scholar, Ronald E. McNair Scholar, Bunton-Waller Scholar
  • Dean's List, Phi Kappa Phi
  • President, Gamma Nu chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.
  • Chapter representative to the National Pan-Hellenic Council
  • Vice President, PSU chapter of the NAACP
  • Coursework: Intro to Object Oriented Programming (C++), Organization of Data (SQL/Databases), Intro to Computer Networking, Econometrics I, Econometrics II, Statistics, Calculus

Conference Talks

  • Large Language Models for Code Generation and Exploration Using TypeScript (Netflix PE UI Roundtable, 2024)
  • Transformers: More than Meets the Eye (Global Summit for Node.js Conference, Virtual, 2024)
  • Spinnaker As a Continuous Delivery Solution for JavaScript Applications (DevOps.js Conference, Virtual, 2024)
  • A Look at Stable Diffusion and Llama As Open-Source LLM Solutions (Harvard Business School, Boston MA, 2023)
  • Using Big Data Pipelines to Drive Strategic Decisions at Netflix (Harvard Business School, Boston, MA, 2023)
  • Netflix Career Day Panelist (Netflix, New York, NY, 2023)
  • Forecasting Stock Prices Using Long Short-term Memory Networks and TensorFlow.js, JSConf India Conference (Bangalore, India, 2023)
  • Forecasting Stock Prices Using LSTMs and TensorFlow.js and Node.js (Global Summit for Node, 2023)
  • Building Machine Learning Pipelines with Node.js (Global Summit for Node, 2022)
  • Building Deep Learning Pipelines for Your Business (Harvard University, 2021)

See the complete list on the Speaking page.

Additional Skills, Activities & Hobbies

Professional Accomplishments: Invited to speak at the White House, New York University, Harvard Business School, and the United Nations, and have been featured or quoted in TechCrunch, Forbes, Fortune, Fortune Live, CNN/Money, Black Enterprise, TechRepublic, and The Huffington Post.

Publications: Learn Algorithmic Trading with Python (Apress/Springer), TensorFlow.js Quickstart Guide (Open Sourced/Self-published)

Technical Talks: A Look at TensorFlow.js, An Introduction to React, Introduction to React and Redux, Intro to ES6, Intro to Node, Intro to iOS Development, Intro to TypeScript, Web Scraping with Node.js, Building Deep Learning Pipelines for Your Business Using TensorFlow, Black Unicorns Part I: An Introduction to Data Cleaning and Analysis with Python and R, Black Unicorns Part II: An Introduction to Data Visualization with Python and R.

Interests/Hobbies: Photography, filmmaking, painting, traveling (England, France, Spain, Italy, Singapore, Malaysia, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Mexico, Barbados, UK, Iceland, Hawaii, USVI, and almost every major US and Canadian city), community service, teaching, developing high-frequency automated trading strategies for cryptocurrencies in Python and Rust

Activities: Code Crew Meetup (organizer — over 11,000 members), MEAN Stack NYC Meetup (organizer — over 1,700 members), Congressional App Challenge (judge)

Organizations: Member and former Secretary of Widow's Son Lodge No. 11 (under the jurisdiction of the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of New York Free and Accepted Masons), Member — Alpha Gamma Lambda Graduate Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.

Random facts: Sallie Krawcheck once told me I am a great speaker. I worked directly with the developers of the systematic trading systems mentioned in Michael Lewis' best-selling book, Flash Boys.