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Eric Hare

About

Short version: statistician who became a software engineer.

Longer version below. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, learned to code the old-fashioned way (shipping bad R code), picked up statistics at UW, and got a PhD at Iowa State. Today I work on AI-agent tooling at IBM, and I still write R on weekends.

I'm a software engineer at IBM on the DOE — Developer and Operator Experience team, where I'm a core maintainer of Langflow. I joined IBM in August 2025 when it acquired DataStax, which had in turn acquired Langflow in 2024 — a trajectory that has let me stay on the same codebase through two name changes on the org chart.

I did my undergrad at the University of Washington (dual degrees in Statistics and Computer Engineering, 2012) and my PhD at Iowa State (Statistics & Computer Science, 2017). My dissertation was on automated bullet matching — I worked with CSAFE on using 3D surface scans of spent bullets to link them back to the gun that fired them. Surprisingly fun problem; genuinely useful in court.

Between then and now: Chief Data Scientist at Omni Analytics Group (2017–2021), Senior Data Scientist at Daisi Technology (2021–2022), then on to DataStax (2022–2025) and into IBM when they acquired us. I've authored or co-authored a few R packages (discreteRV, bulletr, bulletxtrctr), published in Annals of Applied Statistics and JCGS, and written for CHANCE, InfoWorld, and the DataStax / Daisi engineering blogs.

Outside work: I live north of Seattle with my partner and our two cats, love gaming, and still occasionally use the terminal to solve Advent of Code.

Timeline

Where I've been.

  1. Aug 2025 — Present

    Software Engineer — IBM

    DOE — Developer and Operator Experience

    Core maintainer of Langflow and ongoing contributor on the Astra DB Data API stack. Focus areas: MCP integration, model-provider abstractions, Docling-based document parsing, agent tool-use policy (ToolGuard), and the Langflow SDK. Joined via IBM’s acquisition of DataStax in 2025.

  2. Dec 2022 — Aug 2025

    Software Engineer — DataStax

    Joined the Langflow core team after DataStax acquired Langflow in April 2024. Shipped hybrid-search + GenAI workflows, watsonx Orchestrate integrations, and Astra DB + Pulsar tooling. Transitioned into IBM with the 2025 acquisition.

  3. May 2021 — Dec 2022

    Senior Data Scientist — Daisi Technology

    Built reference "daisies" — serverless Python cloud functions for scientists — covering YOLO object detection, Prophet forecasting, sentiment analysis, PCA, and PDF extraction. Wrote most of the platform’s engineering blog before it sunset in November 2022.

  4. May 2017 — May 2021

    Chief Data Scientist — Omni Analytics Group

    Led the company’s data-science practice: statistical consulting, Shiny applications, and delivery of the *Creating and Designing Interactive Web Applications with Shiny* course. Helped seed the open-source OmniacsDAO suite (Numerai/DeFi tooling) that the community still maintains.

  5. 2012 — 2017

    PhD Candidate & Research Assistant — Iowa State University

    Statistics & Computer Science. Dissertation: Statistical Methods for Bullet Matching. Research with CSAFE on forensic bullet-striation analysis; co-author of the R packages bulletr and bulletxtrctr.

  6. Summers 2010 — 2013

    Quality Assurance Intern — TIBCO Software, Seattle WA

    Three summers during undergrad — my first proper exposure to professional software engineering.

Interests

Things I find worth caring about.

AI agent tooling

MCP, agent policy, orchestration.

Statistical graphics

Visual inference, ggplot2-era thinking for the agent era.

R & Python packaging

Years of CRAN submissions have made me opinionated.

Forensic statistics

Bullet-matching with CSAFE, ongoing collaborator.

Reproducible research

Good science ships with its code.

Teaching

Designed intRo, taught engineering probability to a lot of sophomores.