Brian O'neill is a seasoned CTO and distributed systems engineer with 14 years of leadership experience building scalable analytics and real-time platforms. He combines hands-on backend development—demonstrated by contributions to high-profile open-source projects like Apache Storm and Apache Druid—with executive roles as CTO or SVP at multiple companies, most recently leading technology at ProofPilot. A DataStax MVP and InfoWorld innovation award winner, he has deep expertise in big data, Cassandra integrations, and stream processing, plus a track record of shipping reliability improvements and cross-platform compatibility fixes. He co-founded and scaled Snapyr’s engineering organization and advises startups through AboveBoard, bringing product-minded technical strategy to early-stage teams. Based in Phoenixville, PA, he balances technical rigor with practical delivery and a knack for untangling integration challenges that others consider solved. Outside of work he’s an avid hacker, hiker, kayaker and fisherman—roles that reflect a pragmatic, curious approach to problem solving.
14 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at Brown University
HPCC Systems (High Performance Computing Cluster) is an open source, massive parallel-processing computing platform for big data processing and analytics.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:13 commits, 8 PRs, 14 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Brian primarily focused on addressing platform compatibility issues and bug fixes related to the HPCC Systems platform. Their work involved adapting the codebase for OS X, resolving compiler errors, and ensuring proper library loading. They also contributed to fixing timestamp handling within the Cassandra plugin and improved the build process to use the latest available JDK.
Apache Druid: a high performance real-time analytics database.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:18 commits, 5 comments, 2 issues in 16 days
Contributions summary:Brian contributed significantly to the implementation of Cassandra-based data segment storage and retrieval functionalities within the Druid database. The commits demonstrate the development of a Cassandra data segment pusher and puller, including schema creation and data loading/unloading procedures. Furthermore, the user addressed compilation issues and formatting concerns, indicating a focus on code quality and system integration related to the Cassandra storage backend.
real-timebig-datadruiddatabasehadoop
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