I am Protik Das. I am working as a Systems Development Engineer (SysDE) at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Our team owns OEM drives across the AWS infrastructure. Yes, all of them.

Before AWS I had a short stint at SambaNova. There I worked on improving the automation around the manufacturing process. Before SambaNova I worked as part of the HPC Infrastructure team of ebeam division at KLA corporation. There I designed air-gapped HPC systems for deep learning applications, the keyword being “air-gapped”. We took inspirations from tools and technologies designed for cloud systems a lot. Often used them as is. Using them in an air-gapped systems had some interesting challenges. At KLA I built custom Linux OS images, wrote infrastructure automation code, designed hardware systems, worked on troubleshooting of existing systems, supported customer escalations, and more.

I did my PhD in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Riverside under the supervision of Dr. Roger Lake. My research was on theoretical material science which was funded by the semiconductor industry. I looked at a new generation of layered materials, more commonly known as 2D materials as a potential candidate for semiconductor industry. I interned at Army Research Laboratory where I formalized a tool I wrote to streamline density functional theory calculations. I also interned at Exabyte (now Mat3ra) where I did bandstructure calculations on 1,000 (well almost) binary compound materials using public cloud in a relatively short period of time. If you are curious about my research, my Google scholar page can be a good start.

I can be reached at LinkedIn. My GitHub profile has some tinkerer projects I worked on sporadically.

This website is built using Jekyll and the skeleton is cloned from website of Nick Craver, Software Imagineering. If you are into optimizing things, I got a treat for you: Optimization Considerations: Measure at the Browser. This is a fascinating read about how Nick optimized his website.