Derek Cuevas

GitHub (contact email in bio)

Summary

Staff Software Engineer at Genius Sports working on platforms supporting the next generation of ultra-low latency optical player tracking and eventing systems for sports.

Contributed to two Emmy award-winning products, CBS’s RomoVision, which earned the George Wensel Technical Achievement Award and Amazon Prime Video, which earned the Outstanding Interactive Experience Award.

Skilled in various engineering domains, with a current focus on building back-end platforms in Rust.

Programming Languages

  • Rust, TypeScript, Clojure, Swift, Elixir, Elm

Technical Stacks

  • Infrastructure: AWS, Docker, CI/CD, Prometheus, Grafana
  • Platforms: Node.js, Deno, Temporal.io
  • Streaming: Pulsar, RabbitMQ, SRT, HLS, DASH, WebSockets
  • Databases: PostgreSQL, Redis, S3
  • Protocols: gRPC, HTTP, GraphQL, ØMQ, JSON, Protobuf, MessagePack
  • Tooling: Vim, Git, GitLab, GitHub, Codeium, Copilot

Professional Experience

Staff Software Engineer, Genius Sports (January 2024 - Present)

  • Designed and developed an immutable and time-series-oriented configuration management service based on PostgreSQL and implemented in Rust, providing a type-safe and versioned API for storing ML models, settings, and flags. Enabled engineering teams to provision settings and query values chronologically for evaluation and simulation needs.
  • Built a fault-tolerant run orchestration system leveraging the Temporal.io platform, written in TypeScript, automating scalable tasks and enhancing the reliability of critical workflows.
  • Contributed to services designed to index, ingest, and distribute data streamed through Pulsar, standardizing streaming architecture and integrations across the organization.

Senior Software Engineer II, Genius Sports (January 2021 - January 2024)

  • Developed the supporting system for the company’s real-time graphics augmentation engine, leveraging an in-house Rust-based workflow processing framework built on tokio and mpsc channels.
  • Enabled seamless integration with high-profile broadcast production teams, including CBS, Amazon Prime Video, Premier League Productions, and ESPN.
  • Optimized real-time broadcast pipelines, reducing latency and increasing reliability for live event augmentations.
  • Supported broadcast operations teams in high-stakes on-call scenarios, ensuring uninterrupted service during live events.

Senior Software Engineer I, Second Spectrum (January 2019 - January 2021)

  • Designed the company’s first GraphQL service, providing a unified gateway for various microservices across the organization, built on the Apollo platform and Node.js.
  • Developed a dashboard using React, Redux, and Three.js for visualizing and searching through 3D tracking datasets, enhancing data accessibility for teams.
  • Created an iOS application using Swift and SwiftUI to display auto-generated video clips as “stories”, streamlining user experience for sports coaches and players.

Software Engineer, Second Spectrum (August 2016 - January 2019)

  • Contributed to the LA Clippers’ “Clippers CourtVision” product by developing the web frontend in Elm and the mobile app in React Native.
  • Improved the quality assurance application for the company’s optical player tracking system, built in Elixir with the Phoenix framework, using WebSockets to broadcast corrections to the operations team in real-time.

Software Engineer Intern, MindGraph Medical (September 2015 - January 2016)

  • Designed the MindGraph Medical landing page using HTML, CSS, Bootstrap and JQuery.

Personal Projects

  • Daily Dall-E: Leveraged Google Trends and OpenAI’s GPT and Dall-E to create daily artwork. Built with Deno and deployed using GitHub Actions.
  • Interview Cake Algorithms Problem Set: Solutions to interview cake programming problems, exploring functional approaches in Clojure.
  • Redux Meta Reducer: A Redux higher-order reducer for simplifying the state of remote data.
  • Friend List: A front-end programming challenge showcasing clean and reusable code patterns.

Education

B.S. Computer Science, San Diego State University, San Diego