Brandon Gonzalez
Principal Software Engineer at Palo Alto Networks
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrandon Gonzalez is a Principal Software Engineer based in New York with 13 years of experience building observability and distributed systems. He currently leads engineering efforts at Palo Alto Networks (née Chronosphere) after driving major performance and product improvements at LightStep, including reworking data ingest and latency histogram systems. A long-time OpenTelemetry/OpenTracing contributor, he has improved core tracing libraries and CI/instrumentation for the JavaScript and Go ecosystems, showing both API-level and DevOps fluency. Brandon combines backend systems expertise with practical tooling—he’s implemented CI scripts, checksum verification, and metrics/noop metrics to harden developer workflows. His background includes low-level work on message queues and consensus at Iron.io and pragmatic product-facing integrations like Grafana plugins and embeddable charts. Colleagues rely on him for performance-first refactors that make complex telemetry systems easier to operate and evolve.
13 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) (unf.) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.) (unf.) Computer Science at Drexel UniversityBellarmine College PreparatoryBachelor of Arts - BA Comparative Literature, Bachelor of Arts - BA Comparative Literature at Brooklyn College
Stackoverflow
33reputation
4kreached
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Github Skills (18)
apidoc10
api-design10
opentracing10
circleci10
cicd10
go10
opentelemetry10
testing9
javascript9
metric9
telemetry9
refactoring9
api8
apim7
distributed-tracing7
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
opentracing/opentracing-go
Feb 2016 - May 2016
OpenTracing API for Go. 🛑 This library is DEPRECATED! https://github.com/opentracing/specification/issues/163
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 6 PRs, 1 push in 3 months
Contributions summary:Brandon focused on improving the `opentracing-go` library. They fixed a bug related to the propagation of sampled status within the `StandardTracer`, ensuring accurate data transmission. Furthermore, the user refactored the code by renaming `TraceAttribute` to `Baggage` and updating tests to reflect this change, which improved the overall usability of the library. Additional work includes addressing feedback by adjusting header handling for proper trace propagation.
golangapispecificationtracingtrace
open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js
Jun 2019 - Oct 2019
OpenTelemetry JavaScript Client
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & API Developer
DevOps Engineer & API DeveloperContributions:12 commits, 27 PRs, 9 pushes in 3 months
Contributions summary:Brandon primarily contributed to the project's infrastructure and API development. They set up and configured the CircleCI environment by adding configuration files and implementing scripts for checksum verification. In addition to infrastructure-related tasks, the user also added metrics and noop metrics, updated existing metrics APIs, and worked with the OpenTracing shim to enable compatibility. These contributions highlight a focus on the core functionality and tooling of the OpenTelemetry JavaScript client.
apijavascript-clientjavascripttelemetryotel
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