Brian K

Senior Engineering Manager, Observability at DigitalOcean

Richmond, Virginia, United States
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Summary

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Brian K is a Senior Engineering Manager specializing in observability and cloud operations with 15 years of experience building and scaling high-throughput, distributed systems. Based in Richmond, VA, he leads observability platforms at DigitalOcean and has deep hands-on roots in low-level networking and log processing from long-term open source work on CZMQ, ZeroMQ integrations, and rsyslog. His career includes architecting systems that handled billions of events per day and designing near-real-time data routing for demanding production workloads. A practical engineer-manager, he blends people leadership with code-level contributions—renaming and refactoring core socket APIs, adding authentication/encryption to rsyslog plugins, and improving module documentation. Quirky but deliberate, he’s chosen to move his public code off Microsoft-owned ground, reflecting a thoughtful stance on where his work lives.
code15 years of coding experience
job26 years of employment as a software developer
bookN/A, Computer Science, N/A, Computer Science at George Mason University
languagesEnglish
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Github Skills (13)

c1710
logging10
socket10
polling10
zeromq10
c1110
rsyslog10
documentation10
network-programming9
sphinx9
c-language8
redis8
cprogramming-language8

Programming languages (11)

TypeScriptJavaC++ShellCScalaJavaScriptGo

Github contributions (5)

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zeromq/czmq

Mar 2014 - Nov 2016

High-level C binding for ØMQ
Role in this project:
userBack-end Developer
Contributions:29 commits, 15 PRs, 5 pushes in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Brian primarily contributed to the core functionality of the CZMQ library. Their work focused on adding and modifying socket polling functions, including `zsock_pollin`, `zsock_waiting`, and `zsock_pollout`. They also refactored and improved existing code by renaming functions and fixing bugs related to socket readiness checks. These changes involved modifications to the core C source and header files within the CZMQ project, indicating a focus on low-level network socket operations and ZeroMQ integration.
multiplexerhigh-levelgossipbinding
rsyslog/rsyslog

Nov 2014 - May 2017

a Rocket-fast SYStem for LOG processing
Role in this project:
userBack-end Developer
Contributions:61 commits, 29 PRs, 33 pushes in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Brian primarily worked on the `imczmq` and `omczmq` plugins, which likely handle log processing and message queuing within the rsyslog project. Their contributions focused on adding support for various features like zeromq-based communication (including authentication and encryption), and different connection types (SUB, PULL, and ROUTER). The user also introduced beacon support to advertise endpoints and addressed several code cleanup and formatting issues.
syslogloggingrocketelasticsearchkafka
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Brian K - Senior Engineering Manager, Observability at DigitalOcean