Hey there, I’m Lucas Hendren. I’m an Entrepreneur, Engineer and climber/skier who spends a lot of time in San Francisco.
I'm a passionate, lifelong engineer, entrepreneur, and researcher.
I double-majored in Physics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I co-authored two publications as an undergraduate—computer vision research in the Journal of Biophotonics and nanotechnology work in Nature.
I began my career at Capital One, where I led the Decentralized Technology R&D team, rapidly building MVPs on emerging technologies. I also worked on a data science team applying ML to fraud detection and a web development team building Masterpass. Outside of work, I'm an open source contributor to Ethereum, TensorFlow, and PyTorch, and a white hat hacker in my spare time.
I went on to co-found SimplyVital Health, a digital healthcare startup, as CTO. I built our decentralized applications and ML analytics from the ground up—the decentralized network, care coordination platform, NSF Phase I project, analytics platform, and data marketplace.
At Alphabet, I contributed to Project Baseline, the clinical trials platform behind Pfizer's COVID-19 trial—providing infrastructure and on-call support across UI, backend, and frontend, and leading the new backend architecture to scale the system. I also worked with Google Brain on high-level synthesis using AI/ML.
I then joined Meta to build new AI/ML infrastructure, where I increased data throughput by 6x. After Meta, I spent a year on graduate coursework, AI/ML research in environmental and healthcare topics, consulting, and supporting my wife's company.
At SpaceX, I worked on Starlink. I rebuilt our financial application from scratch, improved consumer app performance by 10x, led security and authentication initiatives, hardened our systems against foreign threat actors, and launched a new financial installments program that doubled sales across Latin America.
I'm now a senior engineer at Amazon working on AI/ML performance, while continuing research in healthcare and environmental causes. My recent work has appeared at ICLR (machine learning for weather detection) and NeurIPS (reinforcement learning and chemical discovery), and I've lately been exploring state-space models and chromatin/CRISPR research.
So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
- Hunter S Thompson
In my spare time I enjoy rock climbing and snowboarding, having climbed and ridden mountains across the United States. I'm also a certified rescue and advanced diver, an avid traveler who's backpacked through Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia immersing myself in the local cultures and languages, and I can even play a nice tune on the guitar.
I can always make time,
L
