Barrett Olson
Software Engineer at Reddit, Inc.
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBarrett Olson is a software engineer with 10 years of experience, currently building systems at Reddit after several years at Meta in Washington, D.C. He holds a Master's in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan and has a strong background in teaching and mentorship from multiple instructor and TA roles. Barrett focuses on backend engineering and has contributed to notable open-source work such as Facebook’s ThreatExchange, adding usability features and improving PDF parsing and safety-list handling. He combines production-scale engineering experience from large tech companies with practical QA and mobile app exposure from earlier internships. Beyond coding, he has led campus organizations and managed sizable budgets and teams, demonstrating operational and people-management skills. Colleagues describe him as a pragmatic problem-solver who balances reliability, security-conscious design, and clear developer ergonomics.
10 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree Computer Science and Engineering , Master's degree Computer Science and Engineering at University of Michigan
English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (9)
python10
code-cleanup9
code-formatting9
command-line9
configuration-file9
maintenance9
command-line-interface9
configurations9
pdf-processing7
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
facebook/ThreatExchange
May 2020 - Jan 2023
Trust & Safety tools for working together to fight digital harms.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 884 reviews, 185 commits in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Barrett primarily worked on the `facebook/threatexchange` repository, focusing on features related to managing and displaying non-malicious descriptor matches for sample data and custom configurations. They enhanced the codebase by adding a mechanism to manually override the display of "safe list" matches, using a new `show_safe_list` field within the collaboration configuration. They also fixed linting issues and addressed a potential usability issue by printing help messages when no command-line arguments are provided. Moreover, they contributed to improvements to PDF parsing using the `tlsh` library.
queryingsecurityshufflecybersecurityblue-team
BarrettOlson/barrettolson.github.io
Aug 2015 - Jun 2023
Contributions:61 pushes, 1 branch in 7 years 10 months
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