Sam Blinstein

Sam Blinstein has a diverse work experience in the field of software engineering and technical product management. They started their career in 2005 as an Experimental Physics Research Assistant at Northwestern University, focusing on superfluid Helium-3 experiments. Later, they worked as a Technical Product Manager at Vanguard Video, where they engaged with top-tier clients and handled product life cycle and technical documentation for an enterprise video compression SDK. In 2015, they became a Fellow at Insight Data Science before co-founding Bering Science, where they served as the CTO and focused on data analytics for the biomedical scientific ecosystem.

In 2018, Sam joined Metamoto, Inc., as a Senior Software Engineer and Technical Product Manager, where they contributed to cloud-scalable simulation for autonomous systems. In this role, their responsibilities included collision avoidance, systems integration, cloud infrastructure and devops, as well as negotiations, proposals/specs, feature development, training, and support.

Sam then joined Lyft in 2020 as a Senior Software Engineer in the Level 5 Autonomous Driving Division, specializing in simulation and virtual validation. After Woven Planet Holdings acquired Lyft in July 2021, Sam continued their work at Woven Planet as a Senior Software Engineer. They were responsible for building data analysis toolchains and metrics frameworks for simulation, enabling statistical experimentation at scale for autonomous vehicles. In May 2022, Sam transitioned to the role of Staff Software Engineer at Woven Planet Holdings, where they continued their work in virtual validation for autonomous vehicles.

Sam Blinstein attended Northwestern University from 2003 to 2007, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics and Physics. Following this, they went on to obtain a PhD in Mathematics from UCLA, completing their studies from 2007 to 2012. In addition to their academic qualifications, Sam also obtained a certification in CFA Level I from the CFA Institute in December 2012.