Rhys Ormond

Experience

2026-present | Ash Tech Lead (Platform)

2024-2025 | Instrumental Senior Staff Software Engineer (Platform)

  • Reworked long-running, compute-heavy, synchronous jobs to be run asynchronously on AWS lambda
  • Redesigned the permissions model for customer data to allow for cross-org sharing
  • Cut CI costs in half and improved runtime by 40% with more efficient parallelization and right sizing infrastructure
  • Optimized Scala/JVM docker images to be run in serverless contexts

2023-2024 | Instrumental - Staff Software Engineer (Webapp Backend)

  • Served as interim Team Lead/Manager for the webapp backend team
  • Acted as tech lead for interdisciplinary engineering projects, planning and coordinating with the product team
  • Planned and executed migration from a legacy interface description language to Protobuf
  • Onboarded new engineers and maintained training documentation

2021-2023 | Instrumental - Senior Software Engineer (Webapp Backend)

  • Designed and built pipeline that synthesizes disparate types of customer data to find novel correlations
  • Made a lambda-based s3 virus scanning solution using lambda extensions to optimize initialization time
  • Built core abstractions and testing scaffolds to improve engineering velocity
  • Introduced Akka-Streams and JOOQ pagination wrappers that cut memory and became team standards

2019-2020 | Strateos/Transcriptic - Software Engineer L4

  • Architected and built a workflow engine for factory automation that manages parallel execution across hundreds of robots
  • Integrated robots into an automated medicinal chemistry platform by writing control software and ETL pipelines
  • Instrumented core services with event monitoring for improved performance and root cause analysis
  • Migrated build and deployment to Gradle, Jib, Docker, and Kubernetes
  • Wrote a library for automatic compile-time deserializer derivation

2017-2019 | Strateos/Transcriptic - Scientific Software Engineer

  • Designed and developed an "SDK" for scientific workflows that:
    • Provides a python framework for specifying scientific intent
    • Compiles declarative workflows into robot instructions
    • Validates scientific integrity against available devices
  • Built scheduling tools to automate experiments, reducing iteration time and increasing reproducibility
  • Acted as co-maintainer Autoprotocol, an open standard for specifying scientific workflows

2016-2017 | Strateos/Transcriptic - Research Associate

  • Automated lab instruments
  • Built data pipelines for monitoring hardware performance
  • Prepared SOPs for the operations team

2014-2015 | UC Merced - Research Assistant

  • Developed climate and ecological simulation models
  • Analyzed geospatial species range and climate data
  • Characterized regional morphological variation in Pinus spp.

Education

2010-2014 | Willamette University - B.A. Biology (chemistry minor)

  • Hybridization in Camassia: a synthetic approach using geometric morphometrics, microsatellites, and morphology

Publications