Doug de Jesus
Software engineer and educator. Expert in backend systems, ML, and robotics.
I'm a software engineer turned educator with a passion for robotics, computer vision, and building systems that interact with the physical world. I currently teach machine learning, robotics, and maker skills to students ranging from elementary school to adult learners.
Over 12 years in software engineering, I've built systems at every scale. At Facebook, I trained ML models on data from over a billion users to fight spam and abuse. At Codecademy, I rose to Staff Engineer and helped shape the engineering organization as it tripled in size. At Amazon Robotics, I developed software that coordinated fleets of autonomous mobile robots across global fulfillment centers.
After years as a generalist, I pursued a graduate degree at NYU to specialize in robotics and AI, earning a 4.0 GPA. These days I'm coaching a high school robotics team, teaching a machine learning bootcamp, and looking for my next engineering challenge.
Interests
- Autonomous navigation
- Robot perception
- Artificial intelligence
- Space exploration
Experience & Education
2011201220132014201520162017201820192020202120222023202420252026
Work Education
Codecademy
Machine Learning Instructor (Contract)
- Design and teach a 10-week, 20-session Machine Learning Foundations bootcamp covering supervised learning, unsupervised learning, neural networks, and modern AI techniques through live virtual sessions.
- Develop all course materials from scratch, including slide decks, interactive Colab notebooks with scaffolded exercises, and hands-on projects (housing price prediction, bot detection, Spotify clustering, CNN handwriting classification).
- Iterate on curriculum between cohorts based on student outcomes, restructuring session pacing, adding synthesis sessions, and adjusting project scaffolding.
Roxbury Prep Charter School (Uncommon Schools)
Robotics Coach
- Design and teach a scaffolded robotics curriculum covering programming, circuits, and wiring fundamentals through competitive VEX V5 robot platforms.
- Create original educational materials including programming tutorials, technical assessments, and visual engineering references for students with no prior robotics experience.
- Guide students through progressive builds—from 3D-printed sensor-equipped cars to VEX V5 competition robots—preparing the team for interschool VEX competitions.
Nexplore
Enrichment Instructor (Contract)
- Teach after-school STEM and enrichment classes (Lego robotics, 3D printing, woodcraft) to elementary students across multiple schools.
Amazon Robotics
Software Development Engineer II
- Maintain and enhance internal tools used by global operations teams to monitor, manage, and troubleshoot robotic drive fleets across Amazon fulfillment centers.
- Lead the migration of critical services to a new load balancing framework.
- Develop and automate multi-region deployment pipelines to streamline alarm configuration across services, environments, and global warehouse sites.
New York University
M.S. Computer Engineering
- 4.0 GPA
- Relevant coursework: Robot Localization and Navigation, Robot Perception, Networked Robotics Systems, Cooperative Control and Swarming, Interactive Medical Robotics, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Real-time Embedded Systems
Codecademy
Staff Software Engineer
- Led development and technical design of several new services, each spanning multiple engineering teams, from conception to deployment.
- Established engineering best practices, code review processes, training and mentorship programs, and hiring practices. Mentored engineers throughout the organization.
Senior Backend Engineer
- Designed and improved backend services for payments, subscriptions, data tracking, course catalog, content management, search, and remote code evaluation.
- Implemented a delayed payment trial model that drove an increase of over $1M in annual revenue. Reworked data models, access control, and subscription lifecycle management.
- Transformed the course catalog from a static list to a dynamic, tag-based system with sorting and filtering. Implemented caching for fast performance and scalability.
- Created a machine learning-driven recommendation service from scratch.
Facebook, Inc.
Software Engineer
- Built systems, tools, automation, and machine learning to defend against spam and abuse.
- Automated the deployment of weekly retrained ML models to reduce manual effort.
- Implemented a graph embedding covering >1 billion users that was used to improve training data quality, extract new features, and increase classifier recall.
- Helped mitigate a security breach affecting 50 million users.
- Improved incident response time by 90% by adding anomaly detection around reports.
REAL Software Systems
Software Engineer
- Developed enterprise software for royalties accounting and IP management.
- Led development of a data import service that processes >100k sales transactions at a time.
- Refactored extensive legacy codebase to improve reusability, readability and stability.
University of California, Los Angeles
B.S. Applied Mathematics
- 3.6 GPA
- Specialization in Computing
- Minor in Film, Television, and Digital Media