Andy Walker
Principal Software Engineer at Stairwell
Cockeysville, Maryland, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAndy Walker is a Principal Software Engineer with over 15 years of experience building resilient, reusable systems and a deep interest in concurrency, parallel computing, and elegant software design. He currently applies that expertise to automated malware analysis and intelligence at Stairwell, after eight years as a principal engineer at CrowdStrike where he worked on large-scale security infrastructure. Andy has a strong backend pedigree demonstrated by open-source contributions to projects like pgx (PostgreSQL driver for Go) and Apache Pulsar, where he added feature support and built connectors that bridge messaging systems. He combines low-level systems thinking with attention to human-facing design and structured visual data representation, making complex pipelines both performant and understandable. Based in Cockeysville, MD, he brings a practical track record of shipping production systems—from IP/URL reputation services and automated analysis platforms to data connectors—while favoring flexible, reusable architectures. An early career focus on high-visibility state systems and rural tech support gave him a pragmatic, user-centered perspective that still informs his engineering choices.
14 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelors Computer Science, Bachelors Computer Science at Hiram College
Stackoverflow
380reputation
9kreached
6answers
4questions
Github Skills (22)
postgresql10
messaging10
back-end-development10
apidoc10
pulsar10
go10
api10
nsq10
database-design10
event-streaming10
event-stream10
apache-pulsar10
tmux6
vendoring6
kubernetes-pods6
Programming languages (27)
Github contributions (5)
apache/pulsar
Nov 2020 - Feb 2022
Apache Pulsar - distributed pub-sub messaging system
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 reviews, 8 commits, 15 PRs in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Andy primarily contributed to the Apache Pulsar project by developing and integrating a new source connector for NSQ, a distributed message queue. This involved creating new source components and configuration classes within the `pulsar-io` module to facilitate data transfer from NSQ topics to Pulsar topics. Further contributions include enhancements and bug fixes for Go functions related to accessing user configurations, managing metrics, and message handling. The user also worked on fixing several issues within the Go function runtime, which indicates a strong understanding of the backend infrastructure.
event-streamingpulsarmessaging-systemstreamingapache
jackc/pgx
Sep 2014 - Sep 2014
PostgreSQL driver and toolkit for Go
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 8 comments in 9 days
Contributions summary:Andy primarily contributed to the `pgx` PostgreSQL driver by implementing new features and addressing bugs. They added support for the `hstore` data type, which included implementing encoding and decoding functions, and creating `NullHstore` for handling NULL values. Furthermore, the user made adjustments to existing code, such as fixing a spurious return and refactoring code to use the newly introduced `Hstore` type. They also introduced a keep-alive option for the connection.
golangpostgresql-drivergopostgrespostgresql
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