Data systems engineering

Dylan A. Royston, PhD

Data platforms and software for complex problems.

I build reliable data infrastructure and tools that help teams explore complex data, advance research, and ship products. My background spans production engineering, AI/ML workflows, and neuroscience.

Available for engineering roles and consulting.

Previously Senior Data Engineer at Synchron.

Get in touch Résumé

Selected professional work

Synchron · Senior Data Engineer
Data infrastructure for research and clinical trials
As Synchron’s research needs scaled into production and international clinical trials, I built a data platform to support that next stage: making hundreds of hours of dense neural recordings and device telemetry accessible, searchable, and useful.
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Manifold · Data Engineer
Engineering across research and production
At Manifold, I stepped into unfamiliar client teams and took ownership of data problems spanning research and production. My starting point was the context: what users were trying to accomplish, why the system behaved as it did, and what a change would mean for the people depending on it.
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Capabilities

Data platforms

Reliable ingestion and data modeling
Orchestration and distributed processing
Cloud infrastructure, governance, and production operations

Research and ML workflows

Complex and multimodal data
Preprocessing, analysis, and statistical pipelines
Research tooling and AI/ML workflows

Applications and visualization

Data exploration tools
Dashboards and interfaces
Visualizations that support decisions

Technologies include Python, Scala, SQL, TypeScript, AWS, and Airflow.

Background

My lifelong interest in neuroscience led me to research in brain–computer interfaces and motor control. During my PhD, I studied how neural systems work across scales and measurement modalities, motivated by the possibility of building technologies that could help people.

That work also exposed a gap between collecting data and making it useful. The information was there, but accessing it required substantial technical effort. I shifted toward data engineering and software systems to close that gap—building tools that make complex data easier to investigate, understand, and act on.

Experience

2023 — 2026
Senior Data Engineer @ Synchron
Led design and implementation of the data/AI infrastructure behind brain-computer interfaces — production systems for frontier neurotechnology.
2021 — 2023
Data Engineer @ Manifold
Turned messy, multi-source data into production-scale ETL and ML platforms on AWS.
2020 — 2021
Postdoctoral Fellow @ University of Pittsburgh / UPMC
Built data and signal-processing platforms for multimodal clinical research on sensitive medical data.

Education

2014 — 2019
PhD, Bioengineering @ University of Pittsburgh
Neural Engineering (fMRI and intracortical BCI)
Pittsburgh, PA
2009 — 2013
BS, Engineering Science @ University of Virginia
Biomedical Engineering/Neuroscience (whole-cell electrophysiology)
Charlottesville, VA