Adem Gencer
Senior Engineering Manager at Pinterest
United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAdem Gencer is a senior engineering manager with 14 years building and operating large-scale distributed systems, currently leading Pinterest’s in-house key-value storage platform after driving LinkedIn’s Kafka and Northguard teams. He holds a PhD from Cornell where his blockchain scalability research earned wide adoption and thousands of citations, and he bridges deep research pedigree with hands-on infrastructure engineering. Adem is a core contributor and co-creator of Cruise Control, the influential open-source system that automates Kafka cluster rebalancing, and has shipped robust improvements to its performance and observability. Known for turning complex distributed systems problems into pragmatic APIs and reliable platforms, he blends technical leadership, mentorship, and a track record of productionizing novel protocols. An interesting detail: his academic protocols have been adopted by multiple blockchain projects, reflecting a rare combination of academic impact and production-grade system design.
13 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science at Cornell UniversityHigh School Diploma, High School Diploma at Kabataş Erkek LisesiTechnical University of DenmarkBachelor of Science (BS) Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Science (BS) Computer Engineering at Boğaziçi University
Github Skills (12)
collections10
javas10
kafka10
apache-kafka10
api10
data-collection10
apidoc10
metric10
java10
multithreading9
zookeeper9
performance-tuning9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
linkedin/cruise-control
Oct 2017 - Jul 2022
Cruise-control is the first of its kind to fully automate the dynamic workload rebalance and self-healing of a Kafka cluster. It provides great value to Kafka users by simplifying the operation of Kafka clusters.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 releases, 528 reviews, 860 commits in 4 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Adem implemented new functionality for the Cruise Control system. Their contributions include the introduction of a metric for measuring request handler idle time, allowing for better performance monitoring. They also made several improvements to the system's internal functionality, separating capacity and rack awareness goals while fixing related bugs. Finally, the user added a mechanism to control the speed of proposal generation in addition to performance enhancements in the codebase.
operationcruise-controlclusterscluster-managementkafka-cluster
efeg/cruise-control
Oct 2017 - Oct 2023
Cruise-control is the first of its kind to fully automate the dynamic workload rebalance and self-healing of a kafka cluster. It provides great value to Kafka users by simplifying the operation of Kafka clusters.
Contributions:4 PRs, 2011 pushes, 856 branches in 6 years 1 month
operationcruise-controlclusterskafka-clusterrebalance
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