Ash Berlin-taylor
Director Of Airflow Engineering at Astronomer
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAsh Berlin-taylor is a seasoned engineering leader with 20 years of experience, currently directing Airflow engineering at Astronomer and serving as a PMC member and committer for Apache Airflow. He combines deep backend expertise—proven by performance and stability improvements to the widely used apache/airflow scheduler—with hands-on cloud and infrastructure experience from roles at Annalect, M&S, and as a founder. Ash has led teams building production-grade automation and cloud platforms (Terraform, Kubernetes, Mesos) and brought software engineering rigor to data-processing pipelines in Scala and Python. His open-source contributions span core workflow orchestration, parser grammar refinement, and library documentation, showing a blend of performance optimization and developer ergonomics. Based in London, he balances strategic product leadership with continuing technical craftsmanship, including release management for major Airflow releases. A less obvious strength is his track record of improving observability and race-condition resilience in distributed task execution—work that quietly reduces operational toil for many users.
20 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Engineering (MEng), Computer Science, Master of Engineering (MEng), Computer Science at University of Bristol
Stackoverflow
3,969reputation
479kreached
45answers
2questions
airflow
top-5%
sinatra
top-1%
ruby
top-5%
Github Skills (26)
markdown10
python10
dbi10
dbix-class10
perl10
sinatra10
markdown-it10
sqlalchemy10
parsing10
sql10
parse10
airflow10
concurrency10
documentation10
ruby9
Programming languages (27)
Github contributions (5)
evilstreak/markdown-js
Dec 2009 - Mar 2019
A Markdown parser for javascript
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:176 commits, 8 PRs, 7 pushes in 9 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Ash primarily focused on implementing and refactoring the parsing logic within the project. Their contributions involved modifying the grammar definition file, `lib/markdown.peg`, to refine the rules for various Markdown elements. The commits show efforts to improve the correctness and structure of the parser, making it more robust and accurate. They also added rules for missing elements and corrected grammar errors to enhance the overall functionality.
commonmarkjavascriptmarkdown-parsermarkdown-itextensible
apache/airflow
Jun 2017 - Apr 2025
Apache Airflow - A platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows
Role in this project:Backend Engineer
Backend EngineerContributions:9 releases, 5826 reviews, 2597 PRs in 7 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Ash's commits primarily focused on enhancing the performance and stability of the Airflow scheduler and related components. They made changes to improve the efficiency of SQL queries, address race conditions in the task execution process, and optimize the overall speed of task execution. They also contributed to the codebase by implementing specific fixes, such as rectifying logging issues and correctly handling cases where tasks are not properly run.
monitorpythonschedulerapacheprogrammatically
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