Braden Groom
Staff Software Engineer at Reddit, Inc.
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBraden Groom is a Staff Software Engineer with 13 years of experience building backend systems and improving developer tooling, currently based in Austin and working at Reddit. He brings deep expertise in service frameworks and data engineering—contributing to prominent open-source projects like reddit/baseplate.py and Debezium, where he enhanced Thrift interactive shells, rate limiting, and PostgreSQL CDC type handling. His background includes production work at Apple and a variety of research and delivery roles from university labs to civic tech, showing comfort across both fast-moving product teams and research-oriented environments. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic refactors that improve performance and maintainability, as evidenced by his type registry optimizations and tracing fixes. He pairs systems-level thinking with attention to developer experience, often improving documentation and build processes alongside code. Outside obvious engineering chops, his trajectory reflects a habit of moving between academia, civic projects, and large tech—bringing diverse perspectives to scalable systems design.
13 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science at University of Alabama at BirminghamPelham High School
English
Stackoverflow
325reputation
66kreached
10answers
8questions
Github Skills (38)
application-framework10
postgresql10
python10
elixir10
debezium10
app-framework10
databases10
kafka10
java10
javas10
phoenix-liveview10
sql10
phoenix-framework10
web-framework10
change-data-capture10
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
reddit/baseplate.py
Feb 2018 - Aug 2022
reddit's python service framework
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:54 reviews, 15 commits, 28 PRs in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Braden contributed to the `reddit/baseplate.py` repository, a Python service framework, by implementing several features and improvements. They added functionality to support an interactive shell for Thrift services and implemented rate limiting capabilities. Additionally, the user made improvements to the codebase, including fixing tracing issues and updating dependencies to ensure compatibility. They also contributed to the documentation and build process, improving the developer experience.
pythonredditservicesframework
debezium/debezium
Apr 2020 - May 2020
Change data capture for a variety of databases. Please log issues at https://github.com/debezium/dbz/issues.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer / Database Engineer
Back-end Developer / Database EngineerContributions:1 review, 10 commits, 5 PRs in 21 days
Contributions summary:Braden primarily contributed to the Debezium project, focusing on enhancing the PostgreSQL connector. Their work involved adding support for PostgreSQL enum arrays, refining array handling, and optimizing type loading within the TypeRegistry. They also updated the codebase to properly handle LTree array conversions and refactored the type registry queries to improve efficiency. The contributions demonstrate a strong focus on database schema evolution and data type handling within the CDC framework.
change-data-capturedatabasedatabasesdebeziumkafka-connect
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