Evan Jones
Software Engineer at Datadog
New York, New York, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolEvan Jones is a seasoned software engineer based in New York with 16 years of experience building scalable distributed systems and security-conscious back-end services. Currently at Datadog, he focuses on tracing performance, robustness, and memory optimization in Go, with notable work on dd-trace-go and gRPC interceptors. A former co-founder and CTO of Lectorius Inc, acquired by Twitter, he has led infrastructure and security initiatives across Google, Twitter, Bluecore, and Datadog. He holds a BASc in Computer Engineering (University of Waterloo), an MASc, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT, underscoring a strong research foundation applied to production systems. An active open-source contributor, his contributions span cryptography (Forge), Go database drivers, and high-performance libraries such as zstd wrappers and pgx improvements, reflecting breadth across security, data systems, and performance.
17 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science at MITBachelor of Applied Science (BASc), Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Applied Science (BASc), Computer Engineering at University of Waterloo
Stackoverflow
398reputation
28kreached
6answers
1question
Github Skills (96)
benchmark10
postgresql10
xor10
lexer10
compiler-development10
testing10
distributed-tracing10
compression-algorithm10
databases10
microservices-application10
rsa10
contextapi10
lexical-analysis10
build-automation10
microservices10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
DataDog/dd-trace-go
Nov 2020 - Sep 2022
Datadog Go Library including APM tracing, profiling, and security monitoring.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & Performance Engineer
Backend Developer & Performance EngineerContributions:5 reviews, 14 commits, 26 PRs in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Evan primarily contributed to the Datadog Go library, focusing on improvements to the tracing functionality. Their work involved addressing potential race conditions and ensuring the correct handling of nil contexts within the tracer, improving its robustness. They implemented benchmarks to measure the overhead of the gRPC interceptor, and then optimized it by caching a global instance and removing debug logging from hot code paths. The user also added testing and fixed several memory allocation issues within the tracer to improve performance.
golangapmtracingdatadog-apmopentracing
DataDog/zstd
Feb 2021 - Jul 2021
Zstd wrapper for Go
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 12 commits, 3 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Evan primarily focused on improving the Go wrapper for the Zstandard (zstd) compression library. Their contributions addressed memory corruption issues by replacing `uintptr` with `unsafe.Pointer` and ensuring the correct usage of Cgo functions. They also fixed a Cgo-related panic, enhanced the stream compression tests, and added support for legacy zstd payloads. The work involved modifications to core compression functions, testing procedures, and build configurations.
golangzstd
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