Brian Olson
Staff Software Engineer at TileDB
Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrian Olson is a Staff/Principal software engineer with 15+ years of hands-on experience building high-performance, highly reliable distributed systems across embedded, web, data and blockchain domains. He has led small teams while remaining a primary contributor, optimizing core protocols and throughput—from Algorand’s networking and Indexer that helped push TPS into the thousands to core consensus and developer-experience work on Aptos. Comfortable designing systems from scratch or surgically improving existing stacks, he blends low-level performance tuning (mutex optimizations, DB access patterns) with pragmatic stakeholder negotiation. Based in Massachusetts and grounded in a Carnegie Mellon CS education, he combines production-grade engineering with a civic bent—contributing to anti-gerrymandering and ranked-choice voting efforts and focusing on work that matters to people.
15 years of coding experience
23 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science, BS Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon UniversityLos Alamos High School
Github Skills (19)
network-configuration10
aptos10
go10
blockchain10
move10
rust10
concurrency10
testing9
performance-monitor9
performance-measurement9
performance-testing9
configuration-management9
performance-monitoring9
metric9
performance-analysis9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
algorand/go-algorand
May 2020 - Jan 2023
Algorand's official implementation in Go.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:439 reviews, 66 commits, 133 PRs in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Brian primarily focused on improving the performance and maintainability of the Go-based Algorand implementation. Their work included decreasing mutex critical section time within the kmd CreateWallet function, optimizing SQLite wallet driver operations. They also added metrics for various ledger components, measuring database operation counts and microsecond timings, improving system monitoring. Furthermore, the user addressed code formatting inconsistencies across the codebase, enhancing code readability.
golangblockchainalgorand
aptos-labs/aptos-core
Apr 2023 - Jul 2024
Aptos is a layer 1 blockchain built to support the widespread use of blockchain through better technology and user experience.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:232 reviews, 64 PRs, 79 pushes in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Brian primarily contributed to the core functionality and configuration of the Aptos blockchain. They modified network configurations for consensus and mempool, implemented build information enhancements, and improved local swarm testing. Furthermore, the user added inspection service tests and enhanced the faucet endpoint for improved usability, demonstrating a focus on both core protocol logic and developer experience. Several commits also involved modifications to configuration files related to consensus and mempool, highlighting their role in system setup and optimization.
blockchain-platformblockchainuser-experienceblockchain-networksmart-contracts
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