Seth DeWhitt 🎷

Software Engineer • Jazz Musician • Seattle, WA

If you have any questions about my experience, projects, or skills, start a chat!

Presenting at a Jazz Education Network workshop

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Aug 2025 - Present
The Data Mine, Purdue University
Research Lead & Teaching Assistant | Practical AI Podcast
- Directing 11 student researchers in collaboration with the Practical AI Podcast (1.5M+ listens) and Prediction Guard
- Working under direction and mentorship of Dan Whitenack, CEO of Prediction Guard and a Practical AI host
- Implementing a RAG chatbot with Perplexity-style citations trained on 349+ episode transcripts
- Designed scalable podcast generation platform integrating LLM-produced transcripts and voice clones trained off podcast hosts
- Providing technical guidance to team members, fostering a collaborative work environment
- Planning/Leading biweekly Agile sprints, coordinating tasks and progress reviews across a 50k+ line codebase
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Jun 2025 - Aug 2025
Chewy
Software Engineer I Intern | Replenishment Engineering Team
- Deployed scalable & containerized development environments with custom tooling for in-house model execution on AWS ECS/Fargate, reducing setup overhead by 80% and supporting 15+ engineers
- Automated distributed system maintenance with AWS Lambda and Kinesis, lowering AWS expenses by 25%
- Engineered persistent storage architecture linking Okta SSO authentication with AWS EFS, ECS, and RDS to support secure stateful development sessions across container restarts
- Designed and implemented Terraform-based infrastructure provisioning and Jenkins CI/CD pipelines, decreasing deployment times by 66%
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May 2024 - Aug 2024
The Online Marketplace Partnership (OMP)
Intern | Data & Analytics
- Integrated sales/advertising data from 5+ e-commerce platforms and 12+ databases into a unified KPI dashboard
- Connected disparate sources including Amazon, Google, Meta, Walmart, Shopify, and WooCommerce
- Enabled OMP experts to analyze data for 11 retail clients, with up to 60 performance metrics for 150 products
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Aug 2023 - May 2025
The Data Mine, Purdue University
Undergraduate Data Science Researcher | Bayer Crop Sciences, Syngenta
- Trained a LightGBM model on 500k+ rows to predict climate-driven corn yield variation for Bayer clients at 91% accuracy
- Optimized model performance through feature engineering and hyperparameter tuning, reducing RMSE by 24%
- Implemented data preprocessing and QC pipelines for 100M+ data points, validated using mixed linear models

More About Me

I'm currently a Junior at Purdue University pursuing a B.S. in Computer Science with a concentration in Software Engineering. When I'm not coding, I'm likely practicing saxophone, arranging jazz music, or experimenting in the kitchen.

This past summer, I was a Software Engineering Intern at Chewy, where I pioneered a powerful, yet scalable service to provide data scientists with development environments loaded with custom tooling and essential libraries, reducing expenses spent on dry-running optimization/machine learning models on AWS during the development process.

Currently, I'm working on a browser extension to help users of all ages detect AI use in their social media feeds, helping them identify misinformation in an increasingly AI-driven world.

For more Q&A, start a chat or contact me!