Sean Siddens

Hey 👋, I'm Sean. I'm years into a computer science PhD at the University of Washington, advised by Mark Oskin. I also work full time as a researcher at AMD Research and Advanced Development (RAD).

My research interests generally revolve around high performance computing, with an emphasis on parallel programming and heterogeneous architectures. I strongly believe that the future of computing will be significantly impacted by specialized hardware accelerators. I'm interested in optimizing application performance on these systems and enhancing developer interaction through improved compiler tools and programming models.

Feel free to contact me: seansiddens@gmail.com 𐫱 ssiddens@cs.washington.edu 𐫱 twitter 𐫱 linkedin
Mar 2026 Joined AMD RAD full time as a Senior Software Engineer, continuing research on GPU layout abstractions.
Nov 2025 Collaborated with Stanford's Hazy Research lab on HipKittens.
Jun 2025 Started a research associate internship at AMD RAD, bringing layout abstractions to AMD Instinct GPUs, advised by Muhammad Osama.
Apr 2025 Gave a developer talk at TT-DevDay on improving the programming model of Tenstorrent AI accelerators.
Sep 2024 Started my PhD at UW.
Jan–Aug 2024 Worked as a Junior Specialist at UCSC, leading work on the Ecoscape project, a tool to visualize and model the habitat connectivity of birds to inform conservation and climate efforts.
Feb 2024 Attended Vulkanised 2024, where Devon McKee gave a presentation on work I partially collaborated on.
Dec 2023–Jan 2024 Completed a winternship at Trail of Bits with Tyler Sorensen, investigating security vulnerabilities of multi-tenant GPU systems.
Apr–Sep 2023 Undergraduate researcher at the Concurrency and Heterogeneous Programming Lab (CHPL) at UCSC. Significantly contributed to Epiphron, a portable benchmark suite studying fine-grained synchronization and dynamic work allocation on GPUs.