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Software engineer and technical leader with nearly twenty years of professional…
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Erik Hetzner posted thisThanks to everyone who helped me find a job in a tough environment - it means the world to me and I can't thank you enough. I started a new job in early August and it's been great (honestly) to get back to the 9-5! Taking a break from work was a strange experience: I wish I'd been able to do it under better circumstances, but at least I got a chance to do a few home projects and do a few fun programming projects as well (if you need a new XSLT 2 transpiler to javascript well.... https://lnkd.in/gt3M7hUa). Once again: thanks to everyone who helped me get a job - I can't thank you all enough.
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Erik Hetzner posted thisI'm currently looking for a new position, so if you have a line on a staff or senior engineering role, please let me know. I'm looking for something smaller where I can feel like I'm having an impact, and preferably (mostly) remote. But if the job sounds good, I'm pretty flexible!
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Erik Hetzner shared thisErik Hetzner shared thisI support the PLOS Union! I am so proud of my former colleagues (special shoutout to my friend Jaime Gochez!) on this massive effort to organize editorial staff. I deeply believe that this Union will drive positive change at PLOS, help maintain commitment to the mission, and create a publisher that actually advances scientific progress. Learn more and support here: https://plosunion.org/Home -Home -
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Erik Hetzner liked thisErik Hetzner liked thisTwo years ago, I surprised many who knew me by starting the Executive MBA program at University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business. “Do you really need another degree?” Fair question, but the credential wasn't the point. My “why” was that I love to learn, and I realized I had a huge blind spot: how the world works outside of academia and nonprofits. It was hard at times, and I'm also deeply grateful I did it. I learned the things you're supposed to learn in business school. But my most important takeaways have nothing to do with NPV, BATNAs, TAM, or CAC: Everyone carries a unique set of experiences that shapes how they approach decisions, lead, and work. Being an adult student alongside classmates at similar life stages allowed me to connect with and learn from people I’d never otherwise meet. This is a true gift, since life tends to narrow our social circles to people like us. Growth is hard but rewarding. Years ago my mom gave me a card that reads "Do one thing every day that scares you." I framed it and keep it on my desk - It’s a great line to remember for those of us that get anxious outside of our comfort zones. But as a wise classmate said during commencement, that’s where life happens. Our biggest blind spots are usually the connections we can't see. In my M&A class, I found myself taking furious notes on strategies that could help us better support grantees. My Sustainable Investing class treated data as the key to understanding impact, which is the exact thing nonprofits and funders struggle with. Shifting my gaze just slightly, I kept finding throughlines I never expected. I'm not the first to notice them, but it's a good reminder: a change of perspective is where new ideas come from. As for what’s next, that’s still taking shape. I'm exploring ideas and collecting my own data — with a bit more confidence that I can do hard things. I’m hoping to move into a philanthropic advising role that combines strategic problem-solving, synthesis, relationship-building, and execution in service of knowledge and the public good. I’m also open to consulting projects with strong mission fit. If a role or person comes to mind, I’d love to hear from you.
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Erik Hetzner liked thisErik Hetzner liked thisWeek one at my new job is in the books, and I am beaming. I just wrapped my first week as Senior Product Manager of Public Benefit at System, and I had to come here and say: I am so glad I'm here. I flew to NYC to onboard in person, and from day one I was struck by the quality of the people. Smart, kind, driven, and genuinely excited about what they're building. Diving into the domain has only deepened that impression. The work is serious, the mission is real, and the pace is electric. A few people made this week especially great: Patrick Wedlock and Esther Orudiakumo hit the ground running with me and got me oriented fast. Adam Bly and Tariq Khokhar gave me crystal-clear mission and strategy from day one. And Angelica Vina-Albarracin has already become a wonderful partner to work with. Her generosity and warmth set the tone for everything. What's stuck with me most: I can already see exactly where I fit and where I can add value fast. That clarity, this early, is rare. And the fact that I get to help build a new team from the ground up, at the very origin of it? That's not something I take lightly. I'm here for the Public Benefit mission. I'm here for System's charter. I'm here for what this work can do in the world. And honestly? I'm just really happy to be here. 🌱 #SystemInc #NewRole #OpenScience #ProductManagement #PublicBenefit #Week1
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Erik Hetzner liked thisErik Hetzner liked thisAfter an unexpected layoff in January and several months of one of the most rigorous and clarifying job searches of my career, I'm thrilled to share that I'm joining System Inc. as Senior Product Manager of Public Benefit, starting April 20th. System Inc. is a Public Benefit Corporation building a statistical knowledge graph for open science. Their mission is to make the scientific record more accessible, trustworthy, and useful, closing the gap between expert-held knowledge and the people who need it most. It's exactly the kind of work I've been looking for: science-grounded, user-facing, and built around genuine public benefit rather than just the language of it. In my role, I'll be focused on fulfilling System Inc.'s public benefit mission directly, building products that make the knowledge graph accessible to researchers and non-experts alike, worldwide. The challenge of taking complex scientific infrastructure and making it genuinely useful to the full range of people who could benefit from it is one I find deeply compelling, and one I'm ready to work on. I'm joining at an exciting moment in System Inc.'s growth and I couldn't be more energized about the role I'll play in shaping what they're building and the impact they're working toward. To Lucy Bates-Campbell, Tariq Khokhar, Patrick Wedlock, Esther Orudiakumo, Lila Title, and the rest of the System Inc. team: thank you for the thoughtfulness and rigor you brought to the interview process. You made a demanding process feel meaningful. I can't wait to get to work with you. And to everyone who supported me during this transition - the friends who gave feedback, the colleagues who made introductions, and the Never Search Alone community - your support carried me further than you know. On to the work!
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Erik Hetzner liked thisErik Hetzner liked thisAfter more than five years at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, I'm so excited to be stepping into a new professional chapter. I'm deeply proud of the work we accomplished at CZI, but it feels like the right moment to create space for intentional career design. This spring, I'll be completing my MBA at UC Berkeley. It's been a fantastic experience and has sharpened how I think about strategy, deploying capital for good, and building organizations that last. Between now and summer, I'll be taking on select consulting projects and exploring what's next at the intersection of philanthropy, impact, and creative deployment of funding. If you're working on interesting challenges in science funding, nonprofit operations, or venture philanthropy, I'd love to hear from you. Open to conversations about consulting opportunities and what comes after.
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Erik Hetzner liked thisErik Hetzner liked this6 months. * 70 applications * 43 responses (27 nothing) * 9 interviews * 4 technical screens (including two take home projects) And now I have an accepted offer. I'll say more about what's next for me after I actually start. I'm taking a little time to detox from the stress of searching and watch movies. I'm not going to pretend I can offer advice to make a job search shorter. If I knew a secret, I would have used it. What I can offer advice on is: tips for surviving your job search and what you should do before you start on one. The latter works best if you prepare when you're employed. I'll start with the survival tips and move on to the readiness later. But for the first tip: You are not alone. So much of job searching is luck. The timing of an opening that fits you. The mood of the interviewers. Your non-job hunting stress going into an interview. The other candidates that applied and their luck. The first and the last interviews are mostly luck. Your worth is not determined by your employment status. It's hard to believe a lot of the time, so find people who will remind you of that. Remind yourself of that. Set a reminder in your phone, tell it to yourself in the morning, do whatever it takes to reinforce that fact. Give yourself the grace you would give a friend of family member. You deserve it.
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Erik Hetzner liked thisErik Hetzner liked thisAs I close out my chapter at Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, I’ve been reflecting on what excites me most about the future of biotechnology. We are at a pivot point where AI foundation models coupled with perturbation screening are fundamentally changing how we understand disease and identify targets. I am now looking for my next opportunity to leverage these tools to make a tangible impact on patients and disease biology. I am looking for a Senior Computational Biology role where I can bridge the gap between dry-lab innovation and wet-lab validation. Whether it’s at a dynamic startup or a large pharmaceutical company, I want to work alongside smart, low-ego teams that believe deeply in their mission. My expertise includes: - Developing and benchmarking AI/ML models for biological insight. - Analyzing high-dimensional omics data (Spatial, Single-cell, Bulk). - Leveraging perturbation data for target ID and biomarker discovery. If you or someone you know are working on transformative science and need someone with my computational and experimental expertise, or if you'd like to just reconnect, let’s chat, I would love to hear from you. #Biotech #DataScience #DrugDevelopment #Genomics #NextChapter
Experience & Education
Publications
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Compiling XSLT to JavaScript with XJSLT
Declarative Amserdam 2024
See publicationXML remains the best available way to markup text and is widely used in the publishing industry. XSLT, a declarative pattern matching language, remains the best way to transform XML from one form to another, and, importantly, to transform XML into HTML. Unfortunately, there have not been many implementations of XSLT 2 or 3 - the author only knows of one widely available (Saxon). With the release of fontoxpath, an XPath 3 implementation in TypeScript, it became feasible to implement an XSLT…
XML remains the best available way to markup text and is widely used in the publishing industry. XSLT, a declarative pattern matching language, remains the best way to transform XML from one form to another, and, importantly, to transform XML into HTML. Unfortunately, there have not been many implementations of XSLT 2 or 3 - the author only knows of one widely available (Saxon). With the release of fontoxpath, an XPath 3 implementation in TypeScript, it became feasible to implement an XSLT compiler that targets the JavaScript language. The JavaScript language has multiple implementations and can run on servers, browsers, and on “serverless” functions. With today’s JIT compilation, caching, and static analysis, we can target transform speeds comparable to other implementations. I will describe how compilation to JavaScript is achieved and some methods used for speeding up processing and present some possible uses for this project.
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A Simple Method for Citation Metadata Extraction using Hidden Markov Models
Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries
Projects
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XJSLT
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Languages
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English
Native or bilingual proficiency
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Spanish
Elementary proficiency
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