Adam Holley
Senior Principal Research Scientist at Dell Technologies
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAdam Holley is a Senior Principal Research Scientist in Austin with over 25 years of software and systems engineering experience and a decade in senior roles focusing on cloud, security, and data platforms. He blends deep back-end and DevOps expertise—evident in contributions to high-profile open-source projects like Cloudera Cloudbreak and Apache Impala—with practical security engineering, authorization testing, and FreeIPA integration work. At Dell and prior companies he has driven platform reliability, health-check and instance-management automation, and ownership/authorization improvements that reduce operational risk. Known as an “expert generalist,” he moves comfortably between C/C++, Java, cloud automation and legacy enterprise systems, and he has repeatedly led cross-functional teams to production-ready solutions. Less obvious: his career traces from low-level messaging and datacenter architecture to modern cloud-native analytics, giving him rare end-to-end insight into both infrastructure and application layers.
10 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin
Github Skills (20)
authorizations10
cloud-computing10
back-end-development10
health-check10
java10
security10
javas10
junit10
freeipa10
authorization10
jtest10
imp10
impala10
microsoft-azure9
bash9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
hortonworks/cloudbreak
Dec 2019 - Apr 2020
CDP Public Cloud is an integrated analytics and data management platform deployed on cloud services. It offers broad data analytics and artificial intelligence functionality along with secure user access and data governance features.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:17 commits, 23 PRs, 59 pushes in 4 months
Contributions summary:Adam primarily contributed to the FreeIPA integration and health check features, modifying code to add connection checks and instance ID retrieval. They enhanced the health check system by incorporating issue reporting for unresponsive nodes and updated the Azure and AWS instance handling for reboot and startup. In addition, the user updated build scripts and configurations for health agent and backup operations.
data-management-platformcdp-public-cloudsecurecloud-servicesdata-management
apache/impala
Mar 2018 - Oct 2018
Apache Impala
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:23 commits in 7 months
Contributions summary:Adam focused on enhancing the authorization tests within the Apache Impala project, rewriting and adding tests to improve the security and access control mechanisms. Their contributions involved modifying Java code, specifically in the AuthorizationTestV2.java file, to test privilege requests and select queries. They also addressed authorization errors related to table creation, modifying error messages to provide better user feedback and ensure database-level authorization. Additionally, the user implemented changes related to the OWNER privilege, enhancing the management of database, table, and view ownership.
apache-impalaparquetolapsqlapache
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